For the average person, about one hour and forty minutes of every day is spent on social media. It accounts for more than a quarter of our time on the internet, so it is a great way to connect with potential customers. And when your business runs great social media campaigns, it can generate significant awareness of your brand; increasing both the number of leads you acquire and brand loyalty.

The Changing Face Of Social Media

The continuous development of social media has seen endless new products and ways to reach audiences for businesses. It has also allowed social media networks like Twitter and Facebook to continually adapt to meet the expectations and wants of their target audience.

Changing Twitter

Twitter has seen a significant rise in the number of developments it has launched. One such change was the poll, a feature that allows you to ask a question, provide a few pre-determined answers and then see the results.

This has provided companies with an excellent way to engage audiences and gather information to help them develop their products and services. Originally users were limited to just two options, but now they can have at least 4, and although it is a small change, it is helpful.

In addition, Twitter has increased the potential length of direct messages that users can send to each other. At one point it was limited to just 160 characters. Now the messages can be as long as 1,000 characters, which can have an enormous impact on direct messaging and if used well, can improve the relationship between a brand and their followers.

Now a major new change on Twitter, is about to come.

Media No Longer Eats Into The Character Count

Previously, your tweets could be a maximum of 140 characters, including any links, images or user names. Now those three items will no longer contribute to your character count.

This change potentially frees up loads of space on tweets to allow users to fill them with more information. It also provides a few headaches when marketing your business. Images have always been popular on social media channels, and updates with images tend to get better interaction rates than those without. However, not every message could contain a picture as it would limit the tweet’s potential.

Now that images don’t count towards a tweet’s character, every tweet regardless can have an image. While this makes tweets look more impressive and helps to raise the quality of content on the site: it makes it harder for marketing.

Assuming a rise in the number of images attached to Tweets, it is now the quality of the image that will become a deciding factor for interest in your brand. Imagine two dog food sellers. They publish an update about their almost identical dog food tins on Twitter. Both include an image of a dog eating from a bowl. Every little detail about that dog will matter now; the color of the bowl, the breed of the dog, the quality of the image, whether there is a call to action or not.

Small businesses, like yourself, will be under pressure to not just use images, but develop quality images that might not be in your skill-set. Even the color in the background can be a deciding factor when it comes to selling on social media with images.

So how can you beat the competition and ensure your Twitter campaigns are still the best on the platform? What do you need to do to adapt to these changes? Here is a quick guide.