Twitter is finally offering some wiggle room on its signature limit of 140 characters per tweet. Now, users can add certain items, like photos, polls, quote tweets, and videos without having those attachments run down their precious character counts.
“Video has become king on a lot of platforms, we see that across other social media, and Twitter wants in on that,” says Brook Bentley, a reporter with our media partner the Northern Nevada Business Weekly. “So they’re letting pictures and other attachments not count against that character count now, which is fair in some respects because, really, it’s not a character if you think about it.”
Bentley says one of Twitter's goals is to stay competitive with other video-sharing sites like Facebook and Snapchat.
“I think the other thing it’s trying to do is bring in new users and kind of debunk the fear of Twitter and 140 characters," she says, “and let people play a little more in that space.”
Bentley says this change is one of several Twitter has rolled out in recent months. Another includes the ability to actually re-tweet yourself in case, sadly, no one else wanted to.
