Twitter does away with its 140 character cap on Direct Messages – for 2 main reasons in my opinion.
Firstly this puts Twitter in an incredibly strong position to compete with the bigger names in private messaging, such as WhatsApp and Facebook. This is a fantastic move to generate growth when there’s a myriad of social messages platforms on offer, it might bring a solution to stop the jump from app-to-app?
Secondly, and this is a personal opinion, Social Media is about the conversation. As major marketers use their social media platforms to close the gap between themselves and the consumer the time is now to start talking to each other –
Twitter is incredibly powerful, if I want to raise a query with a brands service, good or bad, I use twitter. Gone are the days of going through a company’s website, finding a customer service email address and pinging off a formal email. If I want a response I condense my public plea to 140 characters and await the response.
A few times I’ve had a lovely customer service people ask me to email them and provided an address, but what twitter has done, has built its own limitless messaging service, right there, in-app, for me to waffle on to my heart’s content to that same lovely customer service person, without having to switch to my boring old, formal, email account. Genius!
What this means for marketing is more direct contact with consumers, more direct feedback, and a continued conversation that puts the power back in the consumers courts…thanks twitter 🙂