Why Twitter’s Latest Changes Are a Bigger Deal Than You Think

31 May Why Twitter’s Latest Changes Are a Bigger Deal Than You Think

By Kendall Walters

By now you’ve heard that you will soon be able to include multimedia—including photos, videos, GIFs, polls, and Quote Tweets—in a Tweet without it counting towards Twitter’s 140-character limit.

But for social media practitioners, that may not be the most significant change Twitter announced.

Also included their Tuesday, May 24 announcement, Twitter revealed a significant change to the platform: now Tweets that begin with an @name will be broadcast to all followers.

Previously these messages were relegated to the ‘Tweets & replies’ tab and would only show up to the users mentioned. The change means no more .@names workarounds in order to start a Tweet with a username but still send it out to a larger audience.

But that’s not all it means.

Say goodbye to brand spam

Plenty of brands have taken advantage of the relative obscurity of the ‘Tweets & replies’ tab in order to tag relevant (and sometimes not-so-relevant) users at the beginning of a message to draw eyeballs to their account (usually in the hopes of prompting users to hit the ‘Follow’ button).

Now, brands that have been using the @names mention tactic to call attention to themselves or grow their following will be exposed to all of their followers.

Once the update goes into effect, if brands were to use the same tactic, the Tweets would flood their main feed, create a Tweetstorm, clutter followers’ feeds, and likely prompt numerous unfollows.

So long spammy behavior! View Full Article >>

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