Twitter Inc. is making major changes to the way it counts characters in tweets, providing users a few options to compose longer messages on its social media platform.   

The social media company announced on Tuesday it will stop counting attachments like photos, GIFs, videos, polls or quote tweets as part of its 140-character limit. Photos currently take up 24 characters in a message.

When replying to a tweet, a user’s account name won’t count towards a message’s character limit, as the @handle will no longer appear in the body of a tweet’s text. In addition, the company announced that tweets beginning with an @ sign will reach timelines of all followers – meaning the practice of using a period in front of the @ sign will no longer be required.

Twitter will also enable users to retweet their own tweets, which will allow people to resurrect past tweets for context. Previously, users typically copied a link to an old tweet and pasted it into a new one. 

“What we’re doing here is riding a really important balance between the brevity that keeps Twitter ‘Twittery’ -- which people seem to love -- and also recognizing the fact that the creative palette that people use to communicate is expanding," Twitter Canada General Manager Rory Capern told BNN in an interview Tuesday.

Capern added that as Twitter has increasingly become focused on communication about breaking news and live events, users require more room for tweets. 

"Everything on Twitter is about being live, people have really embraced that aspect of the service," he said. "They’ve requested more and more opportunities to communicate in more expansive ways which include videos and images. We just have to make sure it’s easy for them to do that.”

The shift comes after Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey earlier this year indicated that the company was examining new ways to display text.

“We’ve spent a lot of time observing what people are doing on Twitter, and we see them taking screenshots of text and tweeting it,” Dorsey wrote in a tweet in January.

“We’re not going to be shy about building more utility and power into Twitter for people.”

The 140-character limit was born in an era when Twitter users sent tweets within a SMS message, prior to the wide adoption of smartphones.

Twitter says the character-count changes will take effect over the next few months.