Following the news that Twitter is considering upping its character limit to 10,000 Mark Slade, Managing Director EMEA, Opera Mediaworks, comments looks at how the move could alter the approach of mobile advertisers.
Despite Twitter not having yet confirmed their plans for allowing longer tweets, marketers and advertisers have already started speculating on the possible impacts to their industries. In truth having more characters to play with may not significantly alter how advertisers treat the activity they run with mobile ad vendors outside of the social arena.
Instead the real impact is likely to be seen with regards to how brands push out their other content – without the need to link to longer content externally, they could essentially treat Twitter as their own blogging space.
It is unlikely that brands will use vastly longer tweets for response advertising purposes. When mobile audiences know they are viewing an ad they want it to be brief, a wall of text isn’t always the most effective way to engage an audience.
For us, the new ‘conversational’ ad format is interesting as we’ve previously developed units that allow users to ‘choose their favourite’ and personalise their ad experience – this could lead to more two-way engagement between audiences and advertisers, past simply sharing the tweet.
Overall, this development of the micro-blogging format is unique to Twitter so may not impact the activity advertisers run outside of it.
By Mark Slade
Managing Director EMEA
Opera Mediaworks