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MarTech » Performance Marketing » Twitter will reportedly stop counting links, photos against tweets’ character counts

Twitter will reportedly stop counting links, photos against tweets’ character counts

Twitter will stop counting links and photos against its 140-character limit some time in the next two weeks, according to a Bloomberg report.

Tim Peterson on May 16, 2016 at 4:29 pm | Reading time: 2 minutes

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Twitter is about to do that thing it should have done a long time ago. No, not roll out an optional, full-blown algorithmic timeline. It’s going to stop counting photos and links against tweets’ character lengths, according to a Bloomberg report published on Monday.

Twitter might enact the change within the next two weeks, per Bloomberg. A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment on the report.

Links appear to be an even bigger factor in overtaking tweet character counts than photos (and maybe an even bigger frustration for people who already don’t like editing themselves within Twitter’s 140-character confines).

Not only do links automatically take up 23 characters when included in a tweet, but they appear to be included in tweets more often than photos, based on Marketing Land’s analysis last month of 300 of the most-followed brands, celebrities and media companies on Twitter. That analysis showed that a majority of the tweets that were 60 characters or longer contained links, including 68 percent of the tweets that were between 130 and 140 characters long.

So why would Twitter do this? Because maybe people will be more likely to post links or photos to Twitter if it’s easier to do so, and if that happens, then maybe more people will check out Twitter more regularly. Again, maybe. But it’s worth a shot. On Facebook, people can post links and photos without worrying that they’ll need to be even more concise with what they say about the photo or link, and more than a billion people use Facebook every day. By comparison, Twitter only attracts 310 million users each month and would like  to attract more to achieve its goal of building “the planet’s best daily connected audience.”

Will reducing some of the friction in posting links and photos alone get Twitter to that goal? Nope. But it won’t hurt and will make posting to Twitter less of a pain.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.


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About The Author

Tim Peterson
Tim Peterson, Third Door Media's Social Media Reporter, has been covering the digital marketing industry since 2011. He has reported for Advertising Age, Adweek and Direct Marketing News. A born-and-raised Angeleno who graduated from New York University, he currently lives in Los Angeles. He has broken stories on Snapchat's ad plans, Hulu founding CEO Jason Kilar's attempt to take on YouTube and the assemblage of Amazon's ad-tech stack; analyzed YouTube's programming strategy, Facebook's ad-tech ambitions and ad blocking's rise; and documented digital video's biggest annual event VidCon, BuzzFeed's branded video production process and Snapchat Discover's ad load six months after launch. He has also developed tools to monitor brands' early adoption of live-streaming apps, compare Yahoo's and Google's search designs and examine the NFL's YouTube and Facebook video strategies.

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