The Power of 280 Characters

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Publishing tools. Social Flow has discovered that people are liking
and retweeting longer Twitter messages more frequently than the traditional
one forty character limit versions. I'm Jonathan Strickland and this
is tech stuff Daily. Earlier in Twitter shook things up
by doubling the character limit users have when they compose

(00:26):
their messages. Traditionally, once you hit one characters, that was it.
But Twitter's changement, you suddenly had an additional one forty
characters to make your point. It might not be the
great American novel, but suddenly users didn't need to struggle
to find a short synonym for words like ginormous. Twitter
rolled out the change gradually. In November, the company announced

(00:50):
that this switch to characters would become a global feature
almost It turns out that in the Chinese, Japanese, and
Korean versions of Twitter, you'll still need to express your
ideas in one forty characters or fewer. The character limit
wasn't just an arbitrary number to begin with, at least
not completely. Twitter's origins are tied to s m S

(01:12):
text messages. SMS stands for Short Message Service, and it
really just means text message, like the type you can
send on a typical cell phone. In the nineties, standardization
bodies determined that the maximum length of an SMS message
should be one hundred sixty characters. Twitter followed suit, setting
twenty of those characters aside for Twitter user handles. Originally,

(01:36):
Twitter messages were all sent as SMS messages. It was
only later with desktop clients and smartphone applications that the
SMS limitations began to become more of a problem. Twitter
had been addressing this in little ways over the years,
incorporating tools like u r L shorteners and other strategies
to take some of the sting out of finding the
right way to get your point across in limited space,

(01:59):
but then the expansion into two characters. Some people had
a negative reaction to this, bemoaning what they perceived to
be an oncoming era of low quacious tweets filling up
their screens, I suppose, but according to Social Flows research,
people have been responding positively to the change in policy.
The company states that between November twenty nine and December sixth,

(02:20):
two thousand, seventeen, Twitter users would retweet messages below the
old onety limit about thirteen point seven one times on average.
For the longer messages, the number was closer to twenty
six point five two times, almost twice as frequently. Likes
the indication that you think of particular tweet is pretty keen,

(02:40):
but you don't feel the need to repeat it necessarily
followed a similar pattern. Shorter messages were liked on average
twenty nine point nine six times, longer ones fifty point
to eight times. At first, people weren't using those extra
characters very frequently. According to Twitter, only five sent of
tweets during their test period actually exceeded one characters. Only

(03:05):
two percent got as high as one nine characters. The
company used those facts to reassure Twitter users that their
experience reading tweets would not really change all that remarkably.
I suppose I should take this as an opportunity to
apologize to my own Twitter followers, as I am a
wordy fellow and I have taken great joy in rounding
out those two characters more than once. If you want proof,

(03:25):
just go to Twitter and follow at John Strickland. While
the increase and engagement is a good thing, it hasn't
stopped some analysts from viewing Twitter with a cautious eye.
The Pew Research Center conducted a survey to find out
which age groups will gravitate to various social media platforms. Millennials,
the largest generation in the United States, make up about

(03:46):
thirty six percent of Twitter's users. That might sound like
a lot, but a glance over at Instagram shows that
sixty percent of their users fall into the ages of
eighteen to twenty nine years old. Because of this and
other factors, many tech analysts feel that Twitter is living
on borrowed time. It's hard to argue that Twitter is useless.
Millions of people still rely on this service daily, but

(04:09):
it's struggled to generate revenue and engage with younger customers.
Isn't a great sign to hear more about the Twitter story,
as well as deep dives on all the major social
media platforms. Check out the tech Stuff podcast. In this
long form show, I explore technologies, companies, and important people
in greater detail. It publishes on Wednesdays and Fridays. I'll

(04:30):
see you again soon.