By Judith Lee

You may have heard that Twitter ‘s 140-character limit to set to change to as many as 10,000 characters. While some social media users may applaud this, I do not.  The brevity of tweets has a lot to do with its rapid-fire speed, which has made Twitter the best place to read breaking news for some time.

At first I found the 140-character limit ludicrous. How could a person say anything of substance in 140 characters? It turns out that, with the help of a well-chosen link, 140 characters offers enough room to make one point succinctly, and what’s so wrong with that?

In fact, brevity has gained a lot of respect. A study of retail brands on Facebook showed that ultra-short posts of 40 characters had the highest engagement – 86%. Because less than 5% of posts actually are this short, the character length (80) with the next-highest engagement (66%) are considered to be the “perfect” length Facebook post.

It seems Twitter is responding to user trends such as users taking a screenshot of a longer post and posting it on Twitter as an image. There are also “twitterstorms” where a user posts a number of short posts in quick succession that are meant to be read as a single, longer post.

I applaud the impulse to respond to user trends. Yet I see this change as transforming Twitter into more of a public blogging platform rather than one that is succinct and well-suited to quips and breaking news headlines.

In a tweet last Tuesday, Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted a screenshot of text — 1,317 characters with spaces — explaining his thinking behind the expansion. Forgive me for struggling to plow through it. Twitter, after all, has trained my brain to favor the “short and sweet” approach.

_______

Judith Lee is a marketing and communications professional who focuses on social media and email marketing based in Atglen. She is a SCORE Volunteer and the Chair-Elect of the Southern Chester County Chamber of Commerce. She can be reached at 610-368-2058 or via email at judithlee@epix.net.

_______

Top photo credit: Lecture du weekend #stevejobs via photopin (license)