It’s curious that since Twitter doubled its character count to 280, people have become politer. The latest data shows that 54% more tweets use the word ‘please’ and 22% use the word ‘thank you’, which is probably making customer service more bearable.
Another result from this change is that Twitter isn’t as full of text-speak and abbreviations like ‘Gr8’ – instead 32% more uses of the full word, ‘great’ have been seen. Similarly, ‘before’ rather than ‘b4’ saw an increase of 70%, and the use of ‘sorry’ rather than ‘sry’ increased 31%.
This change in use of language seems to have increased the conversational tone on Twitter – there are far more ‘?’ used, and replies to tweets…welcome back, grammar!!
Having said all this, only 12% of tweets are actually longer than 140 characters, and only 1% have used all 280 characters – so it’s all about feeling like we can expand our use of proper words, not feeling limited, than writing longer tweets.
Some research has been done about how we respond to longer tweets, and whether they’re more ‘successful’ – the result is that there’s barely a discernible difference. Likes were slightly higher, but retweets and impressions much the same.
Ultimately, size doesn’t matter…it really is what you do with it that counts!
Great content within tweets could be around 140 or up to 280 characters, mix it up. Utilise threads to tell a story and for customer service, spend that little longer crafting a personal, polite response. You can also consider the time your audience may have to read or engage, and whether the image or video you’re using means you need less text.
We see threads becoming more popular, they’re more accessible and shareable than blogs, yet able to explain complex and intricate stories. Humour, and wit also plays a part in these!
THIS THREAD has to be one of our favourites…
