What are some of the best strategies when it comes to using social media marketing to test new ideas? Some might agree that social listening is near or at the top – especially on twitter.  So obviously when Twitter, one of the main platforms on social, break this very simple rule to find out what users want there was a lot of surprise and of course backlash.  With twitter struggling to keep up acquisition and retention of users up, they tried making some changes to their platform.  However, their choice of transformation might not have been the best idea.

Those of you who use Twitter often, and maybe even some of those who don’t, know what I’m talking about – #280characters. Twitter users were outraged when they upped the character limit to 280 instead of giving users what they really wanted – #editbutton.  They claim this transformation allowed people to properly do a tweet storm, however, users managed to storm right around those restrictions before the character limits were changed. Therefore, is this change really necessary?

In fact, some might say that one of the draws to twitter is the limit.  As technology becomes faster, our attention spans slow down – this is one of the reasons people love twitter.  It allows individuals to get a message across and be absorbed quickly. While this new feature is being widely used and is likely to be implemented, it goes against what the platform was created for.

There are three groups when it comes to this change – anger, jealous and the chosen. Some are downright angered by the new implementation, others are jealous they were not chosen, and finally, the others who were chosen feel special but the verdict is still out on whether or not they like the new change. While some of the chosen are happy to have more room to roam, they majority agree that they would have liked an edit button more. This is where Twitter really fell short of doing some proper social listening.  I feel like while others will use it well, the majority will just make Twitter look more like Facebook – which means I’ll be looking for a new addiction.

So let’s do some social listening for a bit.   An overwhelming amount of people are annoyed that their twitter feed is now congested with the 280 character count.  There is still a high demand for an edit button. While others use the 280 limit to point out how useless it actually is.  Others, thanks NASA, show us how to do it well. It will be interesting to see how, if this change gets rolled out universally, it will affect my feed.  I feel like while others will use it well, the majority will just make twitter look more like Facebook – which means I’ll be looking for a new addiction.

So please Twitter.  Can we go back in time and change the #280characters to an #editbutton? If not, someone PLEASE make a Twitter2 with an edit button and 140 character limit?  I don’t ask for much – just my time and less scrolling.