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Twitter Announces New Changes for 140-Character Limit and Retweets

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Twitter has finally announced new changes for 140-character limit exclusions, and also how Retweets work – despite the rumours of extending the 140-character limit some months back.

Twitter is hoping to give users more room to say what is on their mind, improve engagement, and give people more freedom for meaningful discussions.

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Replies

Usernames will no longer eat up precious characters.

When you are replying to someone on Twitter, the actual “@name” will no longer eat into your 140-character limit.

The impact of this is that if you need to reply to multiple people, a chain of people, or someone with a particularly long name – you won’t have to shorten your message down dramatically. Reaching a group of people will no longer mean shorter replies – as previously, when more and more people joined a discussion, the replies got drastically shorter due to numerous usernames taking over the character limit.

Media Attachments

Whether you want to attach a photo, a GIF, a video, a poll, or a quoted Tweet, it will no longer count towards the 140-character limit.

Until now, attaching an image or any other form of media meant sacrificing characters for your message – so this will make that headache much easier.

However, links still count towards the character limit – which is the standard 22-characters.

Retweet Changes

Retweeting previously meant sharing a Tweet from another account – but now you can Retweet your own Tweets.

Twitter is also giving users the ability to Quote Tweet yourself – in order to comment on one of your own past Tweets.

Despite the fact this sounds pointless, it could actually prove to be very useful in reflecting or expanding upon a previous Tweet, or re-promoting a Tweet that had previously gone under the radar of your followers.

Tweets Beginning with a Username reaches all Followers

Twitter is now changing the convention of how direct Tweets beginning with the “@name” work.

A while ago, any replies to Tweets that started with “@name” would be displayed to all your followers – but this led to many users being shown seemingly endless conversations they weren’t a part of, which took over their feed.

Twitter then changed this, so that any Tweets or replies beginning with “@name” would only be displayed broadly to the person it is intended for – with other users having to access the “Tweets & replies” tab on a user’s page to view replies.

Despite this, brands and users didn’t always want to hide directed Tweets from other timelines – so by placing a full stop before the @ (such as “.@username”), Tweets would not be categorised as a “direct” Tweet, but simply mentioned during a normal Tweet. Quite simply, it all got a bit messy, with the huge user base of Twitter wanting different things.

Now Twitter is going back to basics. New Tweets starting with a username (like “@username”) at the start of a chain in conversation, will be displayed to all your followers. However, subsequent replies will not be displayed to all your followers (instead only reaching mutual followers between the participants) – but Twitter now allows you to Retweet yourself for more broad viewing. How this will pain out is uncertain, but it certainly gets around the “.@” convention that showed people weren’t really happy with how Twitter worked.

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Twitter will be introducing these updates over the coming months, in order to give developers using Twitter’s API the time to make updates.

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