Speaker 1: Publishing tools. Social Flow has discovered that people are liking
Speaker 1: and retweeting longer Twitter messages more frequently than the traditional
Speaker 1: one forty character limit versions. I'm Jonathan Strickland and this
Speaker 1: is tech stuff Daily. Earlier in Twitter shook things up
Speaker 1: by doubling the character limit users have when they compose
Speaker 1: their messages. Traditionally, once you hit one characters, that was it.
Speaker 1: But Twitter's changement, you suddenly had an additional one forty
Speaker 1: characters to make your point. It might not be the
Speaker 1: great American novel, but suddenly users didn't need to struggle
Speaker 1: to find a short synonym for words like ginormous. Twitter
Speaker 1: rolled out the change gradually. In November, the company announced
Speaker 1: that this switch to characters would become a global feature
Speaker 1: almost It turns out that in the Chinese, Japanese, and
Speaker 1: Korean versions of Twitter, you'll still need to express your
Speaker 1: ideas in one forty characters or fewer. The character limit
Speaker 1: wasn't just an arbitrary number to begin with, at least
Speaker 1: not completely. Twitter's origins are tied to s m S
Speaker 1: text messages. SMS stands for Short Message Service, and it
Speaker 1: really just means text message, like the type you can
Speaker 1: send on a typical cell phone. In the nineties, standardization
Speaker 1: bodies determined that the maximum length of an SMS message
Speaker 1: should be one hundred sixty characters. Twitter followed suit, setting
Speaker 1: twenty of those characters aside for Twitter user handles. Originally,
Speaker 1: Twitter messages were all sent as SMS messages. It was
Speaker 1: only later with desktop clients and smartphone applications that the
Speaker 1: SMS limitations began to become more of a problem. Twitter
Speaker 1: had been addressing this in little ways over the years,
Speaker 1: incorporating tools like u r L shorteners and other strategies
Speaker 1: to take some of the sting out of finding the
Speaker 1: right way to get your point across in limited space,
Speaker 1: but then the expansion into two characters. Some people had
Speaker 1: a negative reaction to this, bemoaning what they perceived to
Speaker 1: be an oncoming era of low quacious tweets filling up
Speaker 1: their screens, I suppose, but according to Social Flows research,
Speaker 1: people have been responding positively to the change in policy.
Speaker 1: The company states that between November twenty nine and December sixth,
Speaker 1: two thousand, seventeen, Twitter users would retweet messages below the
Speaker 1: old onety limit about thirteen point seven one times on average.
Speaker 1: For the longer messages, the number was closer to twenty
Speaker 1: six point five two times, almost twice as frequently. Likes
Speaker 1: the indication that you think of particular tweet is pretty keen,
Speaker 1: but you don't feel the need to repeat it necessarily
Speaker 1: followed a similar pattern. Shorter messages were liked on average
Speaker 1: twenty nine point nine six times, longer ones fifty point
Speaker 1: to eight times. At first, people weren't using those extra
Speaker 1: characters very frequently. According to Twitter, only five sent of
Speaker 1: tweets during their test period actually exceeded one characters. Only
Speaker 1: two percent got as high as one nine characters. The
Speaker 1: company used those facts to reassure Twitter users that their
Speaker 1: experience reading tweets would not really change all that remarkably.
Speaker 1: I suppose I should take this as an opportunity to
Speaker 1: apologize to my own Twitter followers, as I am a
Speaker 1: wordy fellow and I have taken great joy in rounding
Speaker 1: out those two characters more than once. If you want proof,
Speaker 1: just go to Twitter and follow at John Strickland. While
Speaker 1: the increase and engagement is a good thing, it hasn't
Speaker 1: stopped some analysts from viewing Twitter with a cautious eye.
Speaker 1: The Pew Research Center conducted a survey to find out
Speaker 1: which age groups will gravitate to various social media platforms. Millennials,
Speaker 1: the largest generation in the United States, make up about
Speaker 1: thirty six percent of Twitter's users. That might sound like
Speaker 1: a lot, but a glance over at Instagram shows that
Speaker 1: sixty percent of their users fall into the ages of
Speaker 1: eighteen to twenty nine years old. Because of this and
Speaker 1: other factors, many tech analysts feel that Twitter is living
Speaker 1: on borrowed time. It's hard to argue that Twitter is useless.
Speaker 1: Millions of people still rely on this service daily, but
Speaker 1: it's struggled to generate revenue and engage with younger customers.
Speaker 1: Isn't a great sign to hear more about the Twitter story,
Speaker 1: as well as deep dives on all the major social
Speaker 1: media platforms. Check out the tech Stuff podcast. In this
Speaker 1: long form show, I explore technologies, companies, and important people
Speaker 1: in greater detail. It publishes on Wednesdays and Fridays. I'll
Speaker 1: see you again soon.