SpotlightSeptember2017

By Katie Davis I t was welcomed news when Twitter Inc announced that it is doing a small 280-character text group with the idea that if successful would expand to its entire social media platform as it struggles to look for new way to attract new users. Twitter is hoping that the lift on the 140-character limit on tweets will remove a pain point for the platform English users and will result in more engaging conversation on their platform, driving new and existing users to utilize the platform as a destination for live events and discussion moving away from the company’s original idea to limited character to encourage quick interaction between users. Twitter continues to make platform upgrades and product changes over the past several years making the platform more users friendly and have hinted many times of removing the 140- character limit.

platform for journalists, entertainers, athletes and as we know way to well politicians. Existing users are usually very quick to criticize changes. But in this case we think that they will agree that more is better, but better to test and gauge response before going all in and have users then threaten to abandon the service. Twitter has been struggling to capture new user growth and advertising revenue, which has investors are ques- tioning if the San Francisco-based company can achieve the long-term growth need to grow the platform as active monthly users has stalled at 328 million, which is more or less unchanged from the previous quarter, causing a shares to declined 15 percent over the last two months. Twitter started looking at increasing character limits a year ago that when attachments like photos or videos no longer counted toward your character limits getting ready for the move to 280 and beyond.

As we have seen recently, Twitter is a popular social media

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SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE • SEPTEMBER 2017

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