On Monday, Twitter finally gave in to user demand and increased the length of tweets, making good on their promise when they announced the move back in May.

They made this historic change and managed to keep their storied 140 character limit intact.

Twitter’s 140 character limit has always been in place and the topic of much debate amongst users over the years. The tricky part for marketers has always been that any media included in the tweet counts against the character limit.

Adding links, photos, GIFs, videos, memes, took up space in the 140 characters allowed, which detracted from the message the brand was trying to convey with the text in the tweet.

Now users have a full 140 characters of text to use in their tweets as multimedia, links, and quoted tweets no longer count against the character limit.

Marketers are loving having the extra real estate in tweets.

Here are the ways that I have observed top marketers in my Twitter feed already leveraging the new space to improve the effectiveness of their tweets.

Drive home the message

With the added room in tweets, users won’t have to try to use so many abbreviations. Now they can spell out words like “your” in their tweets, instead of having to shorten it to “ur” because the image or link took up too much space and they had to get creative with the way they spell things to fit it all in.

Many of the abbreviations they came up with fell on deaf ears, as not all users have time to keep tabs on all the latest, “Twitter lingo.”

While the Twitter lingo and abbreviations won’t go away entirely, with the full 140 characters available, there is not as big of a need to be so ultra-brief that the point of the message gets lost.

The extra space in tweets gives marketers the opportunity to craft a complete message that is clearer and more professional in its appearance.

Share both multimedia and a link in the same tweet

In the past, tweeting both a link and an image in the same tweet was difficult because both of them took space against the character limit.

Now that including links or multimedia do not count against the character limit using them together becomes much easier.

Multi-media shows up brilliantly, and stands out in the Twitter feed, much more so than the smaller image that associates with the tweet when users only share a link or a text-only tweet.

More room for hashtags!

Smart marketers know that they now have more space to stick an extra hashtag or two that is relevant to their industry. This helps them find more customers who are also interested in their brand by improving the SEO of their tweets.

The most powerful tweets for brands include a compelling message complete with relevant hashtags, attention-grabbing multimedia, and a link where customers can go for more info.

Originally posted on Inc. Magazine.

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