A Twitter Inc. (NYSE: TWTR) tweet can have only 140 characters, and when certain types of URLs get used, even fewer. It is a fair question to ask whether this limitation has undermined the growth of the company among people who post any message online and has made tweets less attractive to advertisers.
The primary statistics Twitter uses to promote its success are that it has over 300 million active monthly users and those people, or some portion of them, produce 500 million tweets per day. The figures do not mean much if active users are only active once a month.
The first thing Twitter management needs to acknowledge is that not all users are familiar with its “#” and “@” languages, or the way links to other sites have to be shortened. “Retweeting” is also foreign to some people. Regular users find these problems childish, but that does not make them any less real for novices. And novices may find the primary barrier to use is that tweets cannot be longer, say 500 characters, or maybe a few less.
Advertisers sometimes must find they are hamstrung by the few numbers of characters, particularly since some marketers always have been wordy. What does a “promoted tweet” like “Google shares SEM best practices vetted by those who built AdWords. Go to https://goo.gl/zXKQXm” mean anyway? More complex messages lose more of their power, even when a video is part of the promotion: “The Next Big Thing’s edge tells you everything you want to know, and you don’t even need to lift to a finger. http://smsng.us/1PWDlM6 Expect more from your phone. Even the side of the screen. #6v6” What finger and what screen?
Twitter, in such deep trouble as a public company, with a battered stock and confused management structure, does not risk terribly much if it changes the structure of its core product. Aficionados will not abandon it in droves. It is too useful a tool or too addicting a medium for that to happen. And the broader world will have a service they are more likely to use, because it has become easier and its format a more familiar one for the messaging public.
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