It’s hard to believe that Twitter hasn’t exactly been thriving in the last few years. The social media platform hit a plateau with monthly users causing little growth and disappointing the industry.
Twitter needed to revamp their features if they wanted to still be a top tool in business marketing plans by focusing on generating more money and adding new users. And so far, their plan has worked, beating many 2017 investor projections. The new features are geared towards users and with just a few small changes, has successfully driven user engagement by improving twitter experience.
- REPLY – More characters & more room to express yourself!
Of course, there is still a 140-character limit on replies, but now the user name doesn’t take away from the count! Instead of including @user when you rely, it is now build into the reply! But be careful. If you are replying to a tweet that contains multiple users, all of those users will automatically be included. Luckily, there is a way to avoid this. Just click on the hyperlinked twitter handles so you can check and uncheck which users you want to include in your reply.
- CHARACTER COUNT – Media loophole!
The 140-character limit is a staple in Twitter’s identity. Some say that extending the limit would attract more users by allowing more engaging content. But in the meantime, you can still include media in your tweets without using any of your character count. HubSpot reported that media links used to take up to 23 characters, which is 16 percent of your tweet! Now, the links do not count against the infamous 140-character limit!
- IMAGES – More options!
Images are becoming more popular Twitter, especially for a social media site that was mainly focused on text. But now images have become a source of user engagement. Twitter made some adjustments to the image size requirements so that it won’t automatically crop photos like it used to. This allows users to see more of the visual right away, which is why it is increasing user interactions. Also, there is a new way to tweet multi-photos to be put on display!
- GIF Feature – Increasing Interaction!
GIFs are animated images that are a huge trend on Twitter. In fact, GIFs have been shares more than 100 million times on the social media site. It used to be a hassle to tweet a GIF, having to leave Twitter, go find a GIF, save it then go back to Twitter and upload it. Now, you can use a button to conduct a GIF search while you are typing your tweet! It is a more convenient way to tweet GIFs, which is increasing user engagement.
With just a few small updates, Twitter has made a significant impact and has increased monthly users by making their Twitter experience even better. They listened to feedback from their users and was able to cater to their needs to get more users on board and to make a lot more money!
