Twitter Removes 140 Character Limit from Direct Messages

With 500 million Tweets sent every day, the best thing Twitter has going for it is its 140-character limit. This allows users to quickly and easily skim content and engage with the messages most relevant to them. While this is still a necessary and useful attribute for Twitter News Feeds, it isn’t necessarily as important for Direct Messages (DMs).

And Twitter seems to agree.

Earlier in August, Twitter removed the 140 character limit from Direct Messages. This appears to be an attempt to increase the use of DMs for lengthier conversations and greater engagement. With Facebook releasing Facebook Messenger for Business and Google+ tied closely to Google Hangouts, Twitter needed to make a major change to their messaging feature in order to stay competitive and entice users to communicate through their platform.

What does this mean for B2B marketers?

DON’T: Use this as an opportunity to send even longer spam. Just because you can now copy your entire email nurturing campaign into a DM doesn’t mean you should. With 14% of Twitter users being spam bots, your audience has a low tolerance for overtly promotional messages.

DO: Use this as an opportunity to improve how you engage with leads on Twitter. Before, DMs were not an effective way to carry on a conversation with a lead. The goal was usually to trade a message or two before gaining their contact information and moving the conversation to phone, email or another messaging platform. However, this added step could cause sales reps and marketers to lose leads during the transition. Now, businesses should make sure their reps are trained on how to effectively engage with leads inside Twitter to create a deeper connection before trying to move the lead into one of your existing funnels. You are able to get much further in the conversation than before because the limits on your communication are much looser.