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Is Twitter Ruining Twitter?

  • January 7 2016, 9:31 am

  • by Wes Sovis

  • General

For businesses, Twitter is often the most misunderstood and underutilized social media outlet. There are seemingly good reasons for businesses to ignore. Twitter is extremely fast paced, and the 140 character limit certainly limits a brand's ability to articulate its value proposition to consumers in an effective way. Compared to an outlet like Facebook or LinkedIn, Twitter seems inhibiting. But if recent reports are to be believed, that's all about to change. 

 

Changes to Twitter Format? 

Rumors are quickly spreading that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey intends to increase the character limit per tweet from a paltry 140 to a mind-boggling 10,000. If Twitter was a micro-blogging site at 140 characters, how do you describe it when tweets are 10,000 characters long? And how are they going to keep the short, to the point form factor for the timeline that Twitter fans know and love? More importantly, how does this effect businesses who use Twitter as part of their digital marketing efforts?

Our initial impression is that this increase in character count will change Twitter's appeal for digital marketing very little. Look, Twitter's appeal for businesses, both B2B and B2C, resides in the ability for businesses to discover and interact with prospective clients extremely easily; the character count is insignificant in this regard. The ability to search for relevant topics to a business via hashtags allows businesses to find an audience that is relevant to the business's value proposition, and a business can then directly contact this audience individually or participate in a conversation using the corresponding hashtag. Isn't that a marketer's dream? An easily identifiable audience of consumers, which can be contacting directly or en masse? For these simple reasons, Twitter should remain an effective tool for businesses. 

That is, of course, if the current Twitter audience sticks around after the change of format from microblogging to novel-esque tweets. A lot is riding on Twitter's ability to keep the user interface just as fast-paced and easy to skim as before. If they get it wrong, Twitter users could leave the site by the millions, leaving the site a far less desireable marketing tool for people like you and me. 

As a content generation marketer, I also wonder if these new, longer tweets will then be indexed by Google? Longer blogging sites like Wordpress and Tumblr are indexed, so shouldn't these be as well? If so, this would increase Twitter's value to businesses tremendously, as even non-Twitter users would become audience members to a brand's tweets in the form of Google results. 

So, what do you think? Is this the end of Twitter as we know it? Or will these changes make Twitter into an even more attractive digital marketing tool for businesses? Let us know by hitting us up on Facebook, LinkedIn or, obviously, on Twitter