Twitter is one of the most famous and oldest social media sites in the world, currently possessing a user base of over 300 million people. Although the micro-blogging site has fallen under scrutiny in recent times, Twitter still continues to occupy an important place in the world of social media, and the site is currently working on making its user experience better. As of this week, Twitter made one massive improvement to its functioning, one that will definitely change things to a great extent for long time users.

140 fits in a lot more

Twitter has been extremely rigid regarding its 140 character limit, and its CEO has repeatedly stated that the character limit will probably never change even in the future.

That’s perfectly fine as well, because saying things accurately and with maximum creativity is the entire point of Twitter. The only problem users have had so far involves what falls under the bracket of the character limit.

So far, the 140 characters included everything you post in a tweet, with no exceptions. Twitter has finally decided to add exceptions to this rule, making your tweet a considerable percentage longer. According to the new changes, attachments in your tweet, including pictures and polls, will not fall under the 140 character limit. Even videos and quotes from other tweets have been excluded from the limit, which means that you now have a lot more freedom to express yourself on Twitter.

Until now, everything that wasn’t added to the exceptions list would generally take up about 23 out of the 140 characters made available to you. Now, with the change in rules, your tweets can be a solid 16% longer, and any regular Twitter user will tell you that it makes a world of a difference.

A change of fortune

You can expect to see a lot more changes come through from Twitter because of the ample competition in the social media arena.

Brands like Instagram that are relatively new have already overpowered Twitter in terms of regular users, while Snapchat is gaining momentum quite rapidly as well. Twitter has even discussed entering the video sharing platform in the near future with a promising revenue model for content creators. These changes may well and truly be necessary if we want to continue tweeting indefinitely.