So, the first working week of the New Year is nearly over and I think we can now safely say we’ve all survived (even those who had to get across that massive puddle in Newcastle).
The rumour mill was in full flow on Wednesday when it was announced that Twitter might be giving us the Christmas present a lot of us have long been wishing for… the character limit on a tweet finally increasing!
Yes that’s right, seeing that red minus one (or often minus 100 in some people’s cases) in the corner of your page could soon be a distant memory. And if the rumours are true, you’ll have a lot more characters to play with when the limit is upped to 10,000!
The social media giants are rumoured to be planning to keep a similar ‘tweet’ style to what they’ve had for the last 10 years which means you’ll still only see the standard 140 characters, with a call to action button allowing you to access the remaining characters of the tweet.
But could this be a move too close to its competitors?
Since launching in 2006, Twitter has had a uniqueness compared to other competitors– users can talk directly to their favourite celebrities and voice their opinion on popular subjects in the news, using hashtags to link their tweets to others on the same subject. Showing the power of the hashtag, #Twitter10k was trending worldwide for most of the day when the rumour broke, with opinions on the move split pretty much down the middle.
But don’t worry, nothing is going to change in the way you communicate with who you’re following and how you can use the website– if anything you will just end up having a lot more to say!
Originally when the website started, Direct Messages, also known as a DM, also had the character limit of 140 which increased to 10,000 last year to improve the instant messaging service – we see a pattern emerging here!
We don’t really see expanding the character limit as a bad thing, Twitter still gives us the chance to speak directly to celebrities and companies, it just means we now have more freedom to say what we want and aren’t limited to those pesky 140 characters.
And it seems that Twitter isn’t the only one making some changes in the social media world this year…
The popular emoji has been on the rise over the last year and we expect it become even bigger in 2016. In a bizarre, yet clever, move, Kim Kardashian was the first to jump on the emoji bandwagon by releasing ‘Kimojis’. The reality TV star has created a range of emojis all relating to her family and life, because who doesn’t need to add an emoji of Kim Kardashian’s derriere to a conversation? We’re sure we’ll see many more celebrities jumping on this bandwagon soon enough…
There’s no doubt about it that social media will continue to shock us in 2016, we’re only 7 days in and we’ve already seen a puddle go viral so who knows what could happen, but that’s what we like about it!
We love to have a little fun on our own social media platforms, whether it be taking part in the #ChristmasCarolOff which you can see here or having a little fun with our office fish - we’re sure it’s going to be an even more exciting and fun year for online for all of us—bring it on!
