Twitter Character Count

We’ve all experienced the stifling defeat of the Twitter character count. You have an amazing Tweet that is around 120 characters that your followers are going to retweet left and right. It’s going to drive traffic to your site and even generate a few leads… But then you add the link and it pushes your character count over 140. Now you’re stuck deleting commas, changing “and” to “&,” making “your” into “ur” and ruining the beauty that was your original Tweet.

Well your life will now be easier. A few weeks ago, the company announced that they will no longer count links and images against your 140 character limit. That may not sound like a huge deal, but I promise you that it is. You now have the full 14o characters to unleash your unparalleled wit and charm on the world and still be able to share a link that leads to your even wittier blog post.

While publications like Bloomberg Tech have reported that the company considered raising the Twitter character count to as many as 10,000 characters they ultimately decided against it because the concise nature of a Tweet is what makes users enjoy it so much.

In my mind, it is one the main points of differentiation from Facebook. Posts on Facebook tend to be really long, when all I need is a short 140 character Tweet to tell me the title of an article or to preview the video I’m about to watch, not a 1,500 character description. This blog post probably would have been better if it were under 140 characters. Users will make their message fit into the medium or platform they are using and less is usually more, but with Twitter people were limited a bit too much.

This move shows that Twitter does in fact read those pesky surveys they always ask us to take. Good job, Twitter!