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When Twitter increased it’s character limit from 140 to 280 there were mixed reactions! We’d all had to truncate our tweets in the past to squeeze in the important information but was 280 characters a step too far and open to abuse?

Everyone can benefit from the character increase but one sector in particular should embrace the update – the customer service sector, as it gives you the ability to communicate much more effectively with your customers before swapping over to a DM. It’ll allow you to appear more human and sympathetic.

Like Instagram, with the new limit you might think it’s a great idea to stuff in more hashtags – don’t! Twitter is not Instagram and research has shown that tweets with 2 or less hashtags get, on average, 21% more engagement than those with more. In addition to this they just look
plain ugly!

The new limit also allows businesses to explain they have T&Cs or credit a person in more detail.

Most of us understand that if you want to grab customers attention then you need to keep your message succinct and engaging – just because you’ve more characters it doesn’t mean you should create bloated tweets which become more sales orientated than informative. Be engaging and informative.

You might be even more tempted to post the same message across multiple social platforms now, but as any business knows, doing this is not ideal. Each social platform attracts its audience for different reasons, so each platforms message should be tailored specifically to that audience. 

As a business your main goal, after generating engagement, will be to drive traffic to your website product/service and with the new limit you’ve more opportunities to get your message across than ever before. You could include a product page and even a blog page url link in the same tweet and don’t forget that including a photo will also help grab your customers attention. It’s a proven fact that tweets with images are 34 percent more likely to get retweeted than those without.

The additional characters will now allow you to make even more of use of line breaks to give your tweets that ‘stand-out’ from your competitors and to give your information a bit more ‘whitespace’ for legibility.

A final cautionary note though – Yes, you can make graphic patterns with the emojis and yes, some famous brands and celebrities have used this feature but it doesn’t mean you have to – stop and think ‘Will this look good and appropriate in my business feed?’ If the answer is No – take your fingers away from the emojis immediately.

It’s early days but the most important advice I can give is to still be informative, don’t waffle and don’t feel the pressure to use the full 280 characters. Find the balance that’s right for
your business.

If you need more information or help on how Twitter could work for your business please get in touch with me at http://paulkirkdesign.co.uk or at @PKirk_designer

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