Social Network Twitter Expands Its Character Limit

The social media giant Twitter – famed for the limited number of characters users are provided with when generating a message – has recently announced that it is due to expand this limit, but only for direct messages, IGN reports.

The expansion is significant – upping the figure from 140 characters currently, to 10,000. This massive difference will come into effect in July of this year and was first announced by the company itself in an official announcement made earlier this month.

It is believed that this change is in answer to users who expressed a wish to communicate more freely on the channel – however there are no plans to change the 140 character limit on public tweets; in the announcement the social site said: “You may be wondering what this means for the public side of Twitter. Nothing!”

The company stated: “We’ve done a lot to improve Direct Messages over the past year and have much more exciting work on the horizon” before detailing the change. The social media site also provided best practice guidelines to ensure various applications and services are equipped to deal with the changes.

This latest development has big implications for brands on the site, as it means that customer service messages can now be far more detailed – both from the consumer wishing to get in contact, and the response from the brand or business in question. This means Twitter will be able to compete with other platforms when it comes to customer service issues, such as email or other social sites with a high consumer-brand following, like Facebook.

There was one other change made to direct messages on Twitter earlier this year, when it was made possible for them to be sent to and from users even if the recipient does not follow the sender.