Twitter is experimenting with expanding the number of characters allowed on posts to 280. The test began this week with a small, random group of users. If the company finds that people like it better and are more actively engaged on the platform, then good for them. I have no opinion on the strategy. I do have an opinion on what you should do: Stick to 140 characters or less.
Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO, broke the news in a tweet of 228 characters. It read:
This is a small change, but a big move for us. 140 was an arbitrary choice based on the 160 character SMS limit. Proud of how thoughtful the team has been in solving a real problem people have when trying to tweet. And at the same time maintaining our brevity, speed, and essence!
If Dorsey had been forced to keep his thoughts to 140 characters, his statement may have read something like this:
A small change, but a big move. 140 was random, based on the 160 character SMS limit. Proud of team for solving the problem, and keeping our brevity, speed, and essence!
The previous sentence contains 139 characters. It’s tighter, more concise, has no abbreviated words and maintains the same basic idea of the longer post. However — and this is the key — it took me a few minutes and several attempts to condense the message. Brevity takes work. And that’s a good thing.
Rambling is easy, but it takes discipline and effort to concisely articulate your ideas. When I meet with CEOs and senior leaders who are launching new products or services, I challenge them to summarize one big idea into what I call a “Twitter-friendly headline” of no more than 140 characters. The exercise is remarkably difficult and often takes hours, but I remind CEOs that Steve Jobs — the world’s greatest corporate marketer — did this intuitively, well before Twitter was invented.
Here are a few quotes from Steve Jobs’ product introductions. He described each product in far fewer than 140 characters.
“The iPod is 1,000 songs in your pocket.” (39 characters without quotes, which I added).
“The iPad is our most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device.” (79)
“Today, Apple reinvents the phone.” (32)
“The MacBook Air. In a sentence, it’s the world’s thinnest notebook.” (67)
Steve Jobs once said that “simple can be harder than complex.” He was right. It takes effort to make writing and presentations seem effortless.
When I was conducting the research for a book on creating TED-like presentations, I learned that the TED conference works with speakers to keep the title of their talks short, but descriptive. Not one of the 2,000 titles I examined were over 140 characters, and most were much shorter. For example, TED’s most popular talks include:
Do schools kill creativity? (28 characters)
Your body language may shape who you are (40)
How great leaders inspire action (32)
These titles reveal the theme of the presentation in as few words as possible, while still giving you plenty of room to add comments before sharing with the Twitter universe.
I’m an active Twitter user. If Twitter expands the new character limit, I will certainly take advantage of it from time to time. Who can resist? But I’ll do it because it’s easier to ramble than it is to painstakingly edit every word. For the most part, I’ll try to stick to 140 characters. It forces us to edit, and editing makes us better writers.