Killing Twitter

There are massive rumblings that Twitter is changing it's character limit from 140 characters to 10,000 - just as they have already done with direct messages. If Twitter goes forward and makes this drastic, unwanted change, it will essentially kill the micro-blogging app so many of us have come to rely on for news and information. Bite-sized blurbs is why I use Twitter - it's quick, and if I want to read more, I simply click the included link. It's not just bad for those of us that use Twitter for information, but it's also going to hurt digital content creators by turning the platform into another Facebook-like app. We already have Facebook (some of us use Google+), so why invade that space? Twitter as it is, fits a niche and it works almost perfectly.

There's no specific launch date for adding 10k characters to your tweets, but some have hinted at the end of the first quarter (TWTR). If this does have to happen, let's hope only 140 characters will display with a more link to read the rest of a tweet, just like Facebook has done. Otherwise I think this will hurt the social media platform tremendously and perhaps it will help create another app to pop up and fill the space Twitter seems to be abandoning.

Another change I keep hearing about is a new Twitter timeline that will rearrange the order of tweets displayed. Again, this seems eerily similar to how comments currently work in Facebook. Who decides what tweet should be at the top? Is it the most engaging tweet? I don't know...

Here's what I recommend: Keep tweets to 140 characters, but no longer count usernames, photos, or URLs as characters. This will allow Twitter to remain the genius info gathering app that it has become, but allow for less shorthand. News and info will still provided, but users won't have sift through an entire article if it's of no interest.

Professionally, I'll still use Twitter because of the size of our audiences, but I do worry about engagement rates and impressions. What will happen? Will strategies change? Will Twitter analytics remain the same? What about promoted tweets and ads? Soon we'll all find out together but I'm not happy about using another Facebook.