You may have already heard but Twitter is making a major change to their platform that will affect the 140-character limit of your tweets. In the coming months, using an account handle (@name) in a reply and all media attachments (photos, gifs, videos and polls) will no longer count against your 140 characters. So how does this affect how you will use Twitter?

Change the Conversation
Removing handles from replies will make it easier to have conversations with one or even multiple accounts on Twitter. If you’re including several handles in a reply, you don’t have to write in such short sentences that others will have to decode your response!

Get More Attached
…to attachments, that is. You can say more about the media attachments you include in your tweet. You can add more commentary, humor or insight to those pictures and videos you tweet out.

Talk About Yourself
Ok, so it’s not that self-indulgent. You can retweet or quote yourself if you want to add more to a tweet you already sent.

Stop Using Awkward Punctuation
You can stop using the .@name at the beginning of a tweet when you want to include a handle for a tweet to be used for a broad audience instead of a reply to just the account in that handle.

Some of our retailers avoid using Twitter as part of their digital marketing strategy because of this character limit. Either that or they don’t see the need to use both Facebook and Twitter. Avoiding Twitter can be a disservice to your overall digital marketing plan, depending on your local demographics, the audiences you’re trying to reach, and the type of information you share on social.

Ever wondered why and how you should use Twitter for grocery digital marketing? Let’s break it down.

You should use Twitter…

• If you want to reach the millennial demographic (38% of the 300 million people who use Twitter are millenials).
• If you want to share a lot of information on a regular basis with your followers. Many people use to Twitter to get small bits of information quickly. As a grocery retailer, are you posting 10 times a day on your store’s Facebook fan page about sales, store-sponsored events, etc.? You should stop. You’re going to lose post engagement and page fans that way and it would be a much better use of your time to post those little tidbits several times a day on your Twitter profile. The limited space of a tweet and fast pace of the Twitter feed makes it ideal for this type of information sharing.
• If you want to be on the social media channel with the best ease of use for “going viral.” You shouldn’t try to make a tweet “go viral” because it’s almost impossible to plan something like that. But you can use Twitter to stay on top of trending topics in your industry and be a part of the conversation.

You shouldn’t use Twitter…

• To post the exact same content that you post on Facebook on the same day.
• To connect it to your Facebook account so that everything you post on Facebook goes directly to Twitter as a link. No. Just no.
• To try to jump on the bandwagon of a hashtag, trend or newsstory just for the sake of being a part of it. Unless you want to look completely out of touch with the platform users…and possibly become famous on Brands Saying Bae.

Twitter is the third most popular social network so it’s certainly a channel that businesses should consider when creating a digital marketing strategy. The fast pace and short character limit is ideal for certain types of information sharing. And for those unsure about the platform because of the character limit, Twitter is making it a little easier for you.