No matter what your job, you’ve probably got a few things that really irritate you. For us, our pet peeves probably lay in areas that others just don’t notice or simply don’t care!

We’ve had one for a while and it’s been on Twitter. For a social network that’s supposed to be all about conversation and engagement there’s been one thing that’s been holding it all back….

When you respond to, or retweet someone else’s content you’re immediately starved of characters; their twitter name and alike will take up almost all of those precious 140 you’re given.

Why does that really matter?

It’s because it stops conversation. You can’t respond with any meaningful content or discussion as you simply don’t have the space to do so.

So if we were ever going to be in the mood to do cartwheels in the office, the day Twitter recently made the announcement they’d be changing how this works would have been it.

What are the changes?

The two main changes involve replies and media attachments:

• Replies: @usernames will no longer use characters, which means you can include as many usernames in your posts as you want (don’t get carried away though!).

• Media attachments: It gets better, because the changes mean that attachments will also no longer count as characters. Links, images, GIFs, videos and polls use around 24 characters of the 140 characters which we reckon constitutes a huge chunk of your message. Our maths tells us that you’re going to have a whopping 17% extra space so say exactly what it is you want, and still include a link.

Other changes include being able to retweet and quote yourself, which is great if you feel like one of your posts went unnoticed.

Cheerio to the .@ rule!

At the moment, any tweets starting with ‘@username’ go directly to the user, but by adding ‘.@’ they can be seen by everyone. This will no longer be the case over the next months, so it won’t need to be added to tweets that you want to broadcast to everyone.

More reach can never be bad!

There are rumours of even more changes on the way – we hope they’re as positive as these little additions.

For more information on how we can help you with your Twitter activity or social media presence please give us a call on 01566 784860 or email hello@mihidigital.co.uk