You’re on Twitter and need to send a private message to someone. However, you find you have to limit what you can say or even need to send multiple messages to get your point across. Because like tweets, Twitter’s private messaging system limits users to 140-characters.
Or, at least it did.
Twitter has announced that beginning next month on July 1, it will have done away with the character restrictions in its Direct Messaging feature. Now, instead of being limited to 140 characters, users will be able to send direct messages with up to 10,000 characters.
What is a “Direct Message”?
Direct Message (DM) allows users to send private messages to each other directly. Users can either participate in group messaging, or message a single user. While users can limit who can send them DMs, businesses can benefit from sending and receiving messages from anyone. For the many businesses on Twitter, DM is a way to talk to their followers who have questions.
The Change Will Not Affect the Tweet Word Count
If you were hoping that the word count on tweets would change as well, I am here to tell you that they won’t. This change will only affect Direct Messaging. Tweets are still bound to the 140-character limit.
What Does a DM Character Increase Mean for Businesses?
By being restricted to 140 characters, businesses sometimes have a hard time providing quality answers to customers without sending several messages. Now that the character limit is set to increase, businesses can reply to followers without having to limit what they are going to say. Being able to fully address a customer’s concerns will allow them to provide improved service and troubleshooting.
How Does the Character Increase Help Twitter?
Messaging apps are becoming extremely popular (WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger being the top two), proving themselves to be serious competitors with Twitter. People use messaging apps to text each other across platforms without incurring fees. By removing the character limit from DMs, Twitter can now start to take its place in the messaging world.