Marketers’ who’ve shied away from investing their budgets in Twitter due to its tight content restraints may soon be giving the network a try. The “Beyond 140” project reported on by Re/code Tuesday that would bust the tweet character limit out to 10,000 was confirmed as real by CEO Jack Dorsey in a blog he published later in the day.
“We didn’t start Twitter with a 140 character restriction. We added that early on to fit into a single SMS message. It’s become a beautiful constraint, and I love it. It inspires creativity and brevity,” Dorsey wrote, but then mused about what Twitter could become, especially for marketers that have felt hemmed in by that constraint.
“Instead,” Dorsey continued, “what if that text…was actually text? Text that could be searched. Text that could be highlighted. That’s more utility and power.”
Twitter has been under fire from analysts and the marketing industry for lack of scale and functionality. Dorsey returned to the helm at Twitter last year (not abandoning his CEO post at Square) in an effort to right the ship he helped build. Twitter’s stock plunged to all-time lows in October with user levels stuck in the 320 million per month range. The company had been exploring opening up advertising to the millions of people who visit the Twitter site without logging in.
While the 10,000-character tweet has not been made official, Dorsey’s blog makes it sound like a done deal. “We’re not going to be shy about building more utility and power into Twitter for people. As long as it’s consistent with what people want to do, we’re going to explore it,” he wrote.
