Twitter will still have a 140 character limit… but this time it’s playing fairly

Twitter’s restricted character count has long been the bane of many marketers; however, it is what sets it apart from other popular social networks. The microblogging site claims to have 310 million monthly active users*, making it the most popular platform of its kind. Earlier this month, Twitter announced it would be making changes towards allowing users to make the most of the 140 character limit. We have discussed some of the areas they will be adapting below:
Usernames will no longer be included in the character count when replying to Tweets. This means conversations will be easier as simply hitting reply will notify those involved of your response, without having to include their handle in the text.
Images and other multimedia will no longer take up a huge chunk of valuable space – that means no more cramming in text and abbreviating every single word, or worse compromising words with numbers. We all know the importance of including multimedia to enrich social content, but now marketers won’t have to decide between an image or cutting a chunk of text. We now have the potential to generate media rich Tweets with more context. Additionally, images allow you to tag up to 10 accounts which is another benefit of using visual content in Tweets.
.@ will no longer be a thing. Currently, if you tweet a follower, only those who follow both you and the account involved will see post on their timeline unless you use ‘.@’. Changes now mean that you will not need to include the full stop to share the Tweet with all your followers – giving you that all important extra character which so many times has ruined a perfect Tweet. However, this rouses ideas that removing the full stop will increase the traffic on accounts that are already very ‘noisy’. Twitter might need to do something about this to make it optional to see tweets like this on their timeline, to help users regain control.
Finally, not so much about 140 characters, but the retweet option will be made available on your own Tweets, so you will now have the option to re-broadcast a Tweet of your own, perhaps to reflect on a significant time or maybe to just boost that Tweet again and give it more appreciation.
It’s not for certain when these addressed changes will come into force as Twitter have only suggested ‘within the next few months’ but the changes will be warmly welcomed and will enable more letters per tweet, which is brilliant when you just have so much to say!
*According to Twitter (2016) https://about.twitter.com/company