Jon Erlichman

Anchor

Follow|Archive

Say goodbye to Twitter’s traditional definition of character counts. Starting today, users will have more room to craft their comments, when including other media in Tweets.

“Photos, videos and attachments are all central to how we communicate on Twitter,” says Rory Capern, Managing Director of Twitter Canada. “New updates to our character count will give users more freedom to express themselves through visuals and in text,” Capern told BNN in an interview.

Twitter announced in May it would be rolling out the changes, stating at the time the updates would be available “over the coming months.”  The time gap was meant to give time to developers who tap into Twitter’s program interface to make necessary changes to apps.  While some users may not have access to all the changes immediately, the global rollout has begun today.

The move comes as the company seeks to find more ways to keep users tweeting.   Twitter Canada’s Rory Capern says video consumption on the platform has jumped more than 240 times since last year.  “On average, Canadian Twitter users consume five more hours of video per month than users in the U.S.,” says Capern.

The new rollout is also meant to help advertisers distributing video using Twitter. “We’ve worked with Canadian partners including Samsung and Pepsi via our Amplify program to bring top quality content to Canadians with a current example being video highlights from the World Cup of Hockey.”

Here’s a quick recap of some of Twitter’s changes:

MEDIA ATTACHMENTS

Attachments (photos, GIFs, videos, polls, Quote Tweets) no longer count as characters within Tweets

RETWEET & QUOTE TWEET YOURSELF

If you feel like one of your tweets deserves more love, you’ll be able to retweet your own Tweets.

NO MORE “.@”

New Tweets that begin with a username will reach all your followers (@ is fine…no .@ needed)