Surely you have many New Year’s resolutions, but instead of committing yourself to eat more organic and dust off your running sneakers (yet again this year), perhaps number one should be to learn more about social media to help grow your business, not just your friendship circles. And, we are going to help.
The latest in Twitter buzz is the expansion of character limit. If you haven’t been following there is quite a bit of chatter regarding a possible character count increase, even as large as up to 10,000!
Twitter is expected to change the character limit and their target date is somewhere around April 1st. So for a little while now rumors on the web have indicated that Twitter is expanding their limit from 140 characters to 10,000. To put it lightly, people were losing their minds, burning the Internet streets. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey didn’t substantiate the rumors but did add in a recent interview, “(Twitter character limit) has become a beautiful constraint, but what if it had more utility and power.”
While increasing the character count would mean more searchable text and expandable tweets, the 140-character limit was simple. It was creative and fun and it let people quickly read a message and get on with their day. Now we’re not talking about changing it from 140 to 180. We’re not even talking about 140 to 1,000. We’re talking about changing it to 10,000 characters, paragraphs of copy, stories even. Will your message get lost amongst other novels?
On the flip side, the fun part is that now companies will have to be even MORE creative and even MORE informative than they were before. Twitter is a fun application and as we see nowadays is the quickest way to learn about breaking news. What started out as a quick, creative platform for people to easily access and understand might now be turned into long form updates.
Only time will tell… in the meantime, get Tweeting regardless, here are some tips go get going:
Follow relatable/local companies
Depending on your business, you are going to want to be in-the-know in your area. For example, if you are a small, local business, you may want to follow local government and educational accounts. City Hall, Mayors, Downtown, Local Police/Fire Department, High Schools, local Universities are all good accounts to stay informed in your area. If you are larger, then follow associations and vendors.
Make sure you follow your advertisers/investors/media
If you have investors or advertisers or anyone helping you, follow them. Retweet them and have a conversation with them, show them you care.
Keep Tweeting, no matter what
Being new to Twitter, you are going to want to tweet a lot. You can never tweet too much really. Tweet about your company, about your industry, different links on why to pick your place of business, articles you find interesting and relatable.
Build your profile
Give your profile some pizazz. Get a background image, a profile picture and add some color. Nothing turns people away faster than having a default “twitter egg” photo and no background picture… boring.
Talk about what’s “Trending”
Topics or phrases are always trending on Twitter. You’ll notice in certain areas that some phrases that begin with a hashtag are popular in your area, meaning a lot of people are talking about that. For example, if #WinterNYC was trending, you would want to draft a tweet that included that phrase, so it will turn up in more searches.
There are a lot of things you can do for your business on Twitter with just 140-characters, so stop reading and get started!
