In spite of what is being said about Twitter and future marketing capabilities, it is still a viable source for marketers. Even so, some are saying that the future of Twitter marketing is up in the air due to its inability to increase its users’ numbers. Perhaps this is due to the character limitation that makes Twitter, Twitter. Many would like to see Twitter match other social networks in terms of the millions and billions of users. More specifically, the shareholders would like to see those numbers increase as well as time spent on the sight. Below are few reasons that may shed some light on why Twitter’s marketing future may not look so bright after all, if things don’t change over the next few years or so.
140 Characters
The 140 characters that Twitter limits all posts to is now synonymous with Twitter, but the original concept was derived from the SMS text messages. Their character limitation was set at 160 characters, so Twitter decided to set its character limit to 140. This gave individuals an opportunity to state a user name in their tweet. This is a distinguishing feature for Twitter.
Makes a Difference
This move was intended to encourage two things: interaction and rich media. Removing the “at” symbol (@) mention from the character limit was is aimed at allowing people to say more when they are having a tweet chat with another online user. Also, the use of rich media is vital to Twitter: most of their competition has been focused on rich media, for a little while some time and rich media based networks (Snapchat, Instagram) are still experiencing massive user growth, something Twitter isn’t attaining.
Thin End of the Wedge
For quite some time, Twitter has acknowledged that they have contemplated character limit changes (e.g., 10,000 characters was seemingly on the agenda, but such a change would fundamentally change Twitter. Thus, the character limit may vary in the future, but it has to be very careful about removing the one feature which is exclusive to Twitter.
Purpose
The keys to social media success are as follows:
Images, sound and video are key to social media success – and we have known this for some time. But rich media is not part of the fabric of Twitter in the same way that it is for some of the newer social networks such as Snapchat, Instagram, so Twitter needs to try and subtly force the point. Twitter’s commitment to rich media shouldn’t be underestimated though: earlier in 2016, they signed a $10m deal with the NFL to stream games.
In spite of all the negative things surrounding Twitter, by Google placing them back in the search engine has birth a new beginning for Twitter. However, social media strategist O’Brien says he’s recognized new signs of life issuing from Twitter, such as the deal with Google to place Twitter back in search results and rolling out advertising to logged-out users and visitors without Twitter accounts. “This announcement means another 500 million people a month.
Conclusion
With everything being stated, there are a few exciting times to come for the globe’s third largest social network. What do you think the future holds for Twitter marketing? Is it really necessary to retweet and like your competitor’s tweets?