Rant incoming
Anyone who knows me knows that X has a special place in my heart. I was a late adopter of the platform and finally made an account during my second year of college, after giving in to a lot of peer pressure.
After I got started, it was love at first tweet. What I liked about it most was that it was so different than all the other social media platforms. You had to be precise with every single word you used and really had to think about how you were going to write something before you wrote it.
That is what makes X great: the quick wit, the cleverness, and the creativity needed to get your point across without over-explaining your message. As a marketer, it was always a challenging yet rewarding platform to market on because of all the strategy and wordsmithing needed.
Now, all that hard work is gone.
X has announced that it is going to give users twice as many characters as they had before (280), and I am really mad about it and some users already have access to the bonus number of characters.
This change is like having a recipe for the most delicious cake you can ever imagine and changing it because… well really… for no reason.
The writing had been on the wall for some time though. Originally, both usernames and photos required a certain amount of characters in a tweet. When they made that change about a year ago, we should have known that something like this was next.
Why would X do this? Really it makes sense. While platforms like Snapchat and Instagram are constantly adding new users every day, X had been on the decline in the number of users and still hasn’t put a single dollar in the bank. Going to 280 characters gives advertisers more opportunities and could potentially help with their profits and open the door to users who did not have an interest in the platform before.
Just because it makes sense for the business doesn’t mean that I have to like it…
This change does have some effect on small businesses. When we work with companies, we recommend Facebook and Instagram for the most part, but in some circumstances, X makes sense. Companies who use X now have more opportunities to get a potential customer’s attention and have more words to explain what they do this could come in handy especially for B2B companies with complicated product offerings.
By now you might be saying to yourself, “wow this guy is really overreacting to a couple of extra words.”
Maybe, maybe not. All I know is I am going to try to enjoy the cleverness, cunning, and wit 140 character X for as long as I can.
