Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

If Twitter’s value is telling you what’s happening 10 to 15 minutes before everyone else, why isn’t the feature that does that best at the front and center of the app?

Two major news events unfolded this week with the kind of incremental and quickly evolving updates that made Twitter an ideal place to follow both. On Wednesday, a group of congressional Democrats staged a sit-in on the House floor to protest gun violence. And on Thursday, Britain voted to leave the European Union. Throughout both, informed insiders tweeted bits of news and information you simply couldn’t find elsewhere. But unless you were already following those people, or saw a retweet, their updates may as well not have existed; they were trees falling in empty forests. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Twitter is built on a follow model, which is great for some use cases, but also means you’re going to miss a lot of great stuff from people you don’t follow. Unless you followed certain Democratic lawmakers, you likely missed lots of action from the House floor during the sit-in this week. But there’s a solution to that: A Twitter that temporarily inserts relevant tweets from the right people at the right moment into your timeline would be a much more useful Twitter. Amazingly, this Twitter already exists but is buried puzzlingly deep within the platform’s user interface.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is fond of pitching his service as the place you go to see what’s happening 10 to 15 minutes before anywhere else. And it’s true — possessing this information is what’s helped grow Twitter to over 310 million active users. But the company has struggled to grow beyond that, largely because the information Dorsey references is very, very difficult to unearth.

The days of Twitter limiting messages to 140 characters — a signature of the social network since its launch in 2006 — may be numbered. 

Twitter said on Tuesday that it would begin a test with a random sample of users allowing them to send tweets that are as long as 280 characters, double the existing cap, in most languages around the world. 

The San Francisco-based company has stood by its short messages as a defining characteristic — like chirps from a bird, which is the company logo — even as users found ways around the limit, such as posting photos of text. 

In a blog post on Tuesday, Twitter said its emphasis on brevity would never change but that the company wondered whether people could express themselves easily enough on the service, and wondered whether that was hurting its popularity. 

Clicktotweet is the best, easiest and simplest way to promote and advertise your blog, website, business and stuff on Twitter.

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And while Twitter has dabbled with restrictions on visibility in the past (with features like the Quality Filter), they’ve never reached as far as some of Facebook’s tweaks (like code that predicts the authenticity of a status update).

Now that Twitter faces more accusations of enabling abuse than ever, though, they’re introducing new measures that will make certain kinds of Tweets less immediately visible in the timeline.

Among other things, Twitter’s most recent update will target what they call “low-quality Tweets” – but what does that mean, exactly?...

Do you want to grow your Twitter following significantly? Do you want to build a highly engaged community?

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With reach like that, businesses around the world are smart to continue using and innovating on Twitter -- and adapting to the way people use it. Nowadays, 82% of active Twitter users log on using the mobile app rather than logging on via desktop. Just under 63% of U.S. Twitter users get their news on Twitter. And, impressively, Twitter's paid ad engagement grew 208% from 2015 to 2016.

How else are people using Twitter nowadays? How are businesses using Twitter? How does the network impact people's purchasing decisions, and how do promoted tweets boost offline sales? And does it change how connected people feel to a brand?

For answers to these questions and more, check out the infographic below from WebpageFX. It includes some great research and insights into user behavior and how Twitter affects businesses.

Keep scrolling, and you'll find some great, practical tips on the best times to tweet, what to tweet, and how to optimize your Twitter profile. (And for more ideas on how and what to tweet -- including 12 tweet templates to get you started -- check out this post.)...

Twitter has just made a big change to the way tweets work.

From today, Twitter is cutting back on what types of content will use up its 140-character limit.

Now, @names in replies, media attachments (like photos, GIFs, videos, and polls) and quoted Tweets will no longer be counted against the valuable 140 characters that make up a tweet. This allows for richer public conversations that are easier to follow on Twitter and ensures people can attach media to tweets without sacrificing the characters they have to express themselves.

Twitter first announced this update back in May but didn’t quite confirm a date when these changes would reach Twitter’s 300m+ users. However, today the company confirmed theupdate has been rolled out. ...

Are you debating whether your small business should invest time on Twitter?

Do you wonder how Twitter can help your business?

By being an active part of the Twitter community and sharing the right mix of content, you can reach a larger audience, generate more leads and become the go-to source when customers are ready to buy.

In this article I’ll show you how nine small businesses use Twitter to cater to their audiences, find prospects and expand brand recognition....

A search on Google will now display relevant tweets from Twitter in addition to its other results, a move aimed at adding a real-time element to Google.

For businesses, though, it’s an opportunity to get content to show up organically in the search results, which can increase traffic from people who are SEARCHING for a solution to a problem your business solves.

Pretty cool, right?

There are a few simple things you can do to optimize your tweets and increase your chances of showing up in search (not to mention Twitter search) and have Twitter and Google working for you.