Could you imagine pulling an Oreo cookie out of its sleeve to find four chocolate wafers and two layers of cream filling? Or taking home a six-pack of beer and somehow discovering 12 bottles crammed inside?
It’d be discombobulating to say the least, and that’s how many of us marketers are feeling about Twitter’s recent decision to double its character limit to 280. The 140-character tweet felt as natural and familiar as 10 organic listings on a search engine results page. Now, the game has changed completely.
Bigger isn’t always better, of course. If brands simply take this opportunity to double down on their promotional messaging or stack hashtags, it’s not going to create a better experience for users. The real opportunity, as our Caitlin Burgess explained last month when previewing the Twitter character expansion, “is to discover whether or not you can use that extra space to deliver more value and resonance to your audience.”
Now that the 280-character format has been rolled out in earnest, we thought we’d find a few examples of B2B brands that are taking advantage in creative and exemplary ways. If you’re trying to determine how this alteration can fit within your social media marketing approach, take a cue from the clever uses below.
Quirky Brand Plays
What does your company represent? What’s a gag that only people within your niche will truly understand? The character extension opens up new avenues for playful punnery with your followers.
For instance, this was tech conglomerate Cisco’s first foray into the #280characters hashtag:
01001000 01100001 01110110 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100010 01101001 01110100 00100000 01101101 01101111 01110010 01100101 00100000 01100110 01110101 01101110 00100000 01110111 01101001 01110100 01101000 0001010 #280characters
— Cisco (@Cisco) November 8, 2017
Illumina, a genetic research solutions firm, took a similar tact with this gloriously geeky genome sequence:
gagttttatc gcttccatga cgcagaagtt aacactttcg gatatttctg atgagtcgaa aaattatctt gataaagcag gaattactac tgcttgttta cgaattaaat cgaagtggac tgctggcgga aaatgagaaa attcgaccta tccttgcgca gctcgagaag ctcttacttt gcgacctttc gccatcaact aacgattctg tcaaaaactg acgcgttgga tgagga #280characters ?
— Illumina (@illumina) November 7, 2017
Demonstrate Practical Uses
As a social media management platform, HootSuite is uniquely invested in Twitter’s latest pivot, so when announcing they’d integrated the update for their users, they also showed off a smart way to utilize the extra space:
Great news everyone! Hootsuite users can now tweet…
