Good news coming from Twitter’s towers today.

Have you ever sent a tweet with an image, video or GIF and been frustrated that it takes up a chunk of your 140 character limit?

It seems like a lot of users are fed up of the restriction as Twitter announced that it will no longer count photos, videos, GIFs and links from its 140 character limit. The change will give users greater freedom to compose longer messages.

Whilst the news was announced way back in April 2016, the feature is coming into effect very soon, we’re told.

Here’s what will no longer eat up your character limit:

  • @names when replying to a tweet
  • Media attachments – photos, GIFs, videos, polls, quote tweets

Another major change is that Twitter will show your “@name” tweets to all followers. Currently, when beginning a tweet with an @name, only the person mentioned will see the tweet in their stream. The workaround for this was for users to use “.@name”, which would show the tweet to all followers. Don’t worry, if the person mentioned replies, this won’t show up on your timeline.

Twitter is staying tight-lipped on the official launch date of these updates, but our guess is that it’s sooner rather than later. Watch out for the changes over the next two weeks or so.

 

UPDATE: The changes are live! They came into effect on the evening of Monday 20th September 2016. Happy longer tweeting.