The year 2016 began with speculations around Twitter deciding to remove the 140-character limit from the tweets. Jack’s response made one thing clear — to continue being the top real-time public messaging app, Twitter is open to introducing changes to its core.

“We’ve spent a lot of time observing what people are doing on Twitter, and we see them taking screenshots of text and tweeting it. Instead, what if that text… was actually text? Text that could be searched. Text that could be highlighted. That’s more utility and power.”, said Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO.

A few months later, Twitter announced four key changes that they’d introduce to the tweets, and finally, yesterday, they started rolling out these changes to the public.

Say more about what’s happening! Rolling out now: photos, videos, GIFs, polls, and Quote Tweets no longer count toward your 140 characters. pic.twitter.com/I9pUC0NdZC

— Twitter (@twitter) September 19, 2016

Today, I’m glad to announce that we’re one of the first social media management tools that support the longer tweets for our users, just the way we were the first to ship the send-DM-link feature in Zoho Social.

We wrote about these changes and how they’d impact brands a couple of months back. Here’s how Zoho Social helps businesses make use of them:

• Brands can say a lot more per tweet. Say it out loud in 140 characters and add an image to go with it (Twitter confirmed that adding an image to your tweet can get you as much as 35% more retweets). Combine that with the option to upload your tweets using the Bulk Scheduler, the power to Repeat-post a tweet, and the ability to use SocialShare to share content that you discover, and you have a wide range of storytelling options for your business. Social media marketers, rejoice!
• Old habits die hard. But this is one of them that brands might want to get rid of fast. Stop adding a dot “.” before @name for your followers to see your tweets addressed to a handle. All your followers can see your tweets that begin with @name, even if they don’t follow the other person.
• Engaging with the audience got a lot easier for brands. With @names (that automatically show up in replies) not counting to the character limit anymore, adding a personal touch is now easier. Even better, add an image to say more.
• Spotted a tweet from a happy customer? Quote tweet to acknowledge and add your bit using the full set of 140 characters. Neat!

Businesses increasingly use social media to find new customers and engage with the existing ones. Being able to say more in a tweet is a step forward in the direction of having better dialogues while keeping the brevity – something that’s truly unique to the channel. We hope to see brands make good use of these features, and we look forward to supporting our users with the changes.

So, what do you think about these changes? Do let us know in comments or by tweeting us @Zoho.