Good news, Tweeters… Twitter is officially letting you say more when you post a photo, GIF, or video! The 140-character limit for tweets now only includes text – that’s letters, numbers, symbols or spaces.
In the past, photos, GIFs, videos and polls counted against the 140 allotted characters, crushing one’s ability to say exactly what you’d like to. Adding videos, GIFs, and photos all result in an impressive boost in the engagement with a Tweet. According to Twitter’s blog, the most effective Tweet features are:
The moves don’t come as a huge surprise. In May, Twitter revealed that such changes were likely. And back in April, Twitter told us how photo tagging can save us space…
“You can now tag people in a picture (or collection of pictures) that you post. The tags don’t count towards your 140 character limit, so you have more room to express yourself. You can tag up to 10 people, and their names (not @username) will be displayed alongside the photo. As a default, anyone will be able to tag you if you have a public account; if desired, you can change that (to “only allow people I follow to tag me in photos” or “do not allow anyone to tag me in photos”)”
In any case, with video and GIFs becoming increasingly important to the social media platform, the developments make sense. So, how will you use your extra characters?