Twitter is making a small change that is bound to have a huge impact. In the coming weeks, the service will stop counting pictures and links in its 140 character limit, giving its users the flexibility to compose longer tweets.
For Facebook fans, this may not seem like a big deal, as Zuckerberg and Co. still allow your fourth-removed cousins and rando’ bar acquaintances to write their entire life stories in every post (seriously people: STOP IT). For the Twitter elite, this change is a delicious one…because we all know the struggle of constructing the perfect text only to have to hack it up once we adorn our tweets with glamorous GIFs and pics.
But let’s be serious—we all know that adding photos is a great way to get more exposure for your tweets. According to Twitter, adding video, links and photos can result in an impressive boost in Retweets—a 35 percent boost, in fact, for tweets with photos. For real estate, this means more visuals of your listings, from that jaw-dropping infinity pool to that grandiose spiral staircase that has every prospective buyer wowed.
Currently, links take up 23 characters, even after Twitter shortens them. Every photo uses 22 characters. When added together, this only gives users 95 characters to play with. Going forward, users will never have to choose between nailing a message or including some visual shine. Now, we can all have our proverbial cake and eat it, too. (Not really sure what else one would do with cake…)
Brevity is beautiful on the Internet. That’s why Twitter’s decision to never raise the character limit has been a competitive differentiator for them. By limiting the amount of space users have for each tweet, Twitter has created a social media tool that remains easy to use and right to the point.
For REALTORS® who know all about efficiency and time-management, Twitter’s got your back.
This post was originally published on RISMedia’s blog, Housecall. Check the blog daily for top real estate tips and trends.
