community manager Archives - Performance Communications

Community managers around the world just breathed a huge sigh of relief.

Not because Community Manager Appreciation Day was made an official holiday or their parents finally ‘got’ what it was they do for a living.

No, this sigh of relief was because Twitter finally removed the 140 character limit!

Before you go back to the drawing board on your content calendars for August, the change is limited to direct messages.

This might seem like a minor change but to community managers and customers trying to send information back and forth privately such as names, addresses and phone numbers, gone will be the days of…

[button color=”#COLOR_CODE” background=”#66757f” size=”large”]…strategically structuring messages…[/button]

[button color=”#COLOR_CODE” background=”#ccd6dd” size=”large”]… to span 3 or 4 messages, …[/button]

[button color=”#COLOR_CODE” background=”#66757f” size=”large”]…now conversations can be kept…[/button]

[button color=”#COLOR_CODE” background=”#ccd6dd” size=”large”]…concise and easy to follow and act upon.[/button]

Of course, that does open the door to customers expecting more involved and in-depth responses from already over worked community managers juggling streams of conversations from customers and communities on multiple social platforms but we’ll take the wins where we can get them!

Obviously community managers weren’t the first user groups being considered by Twitter with this move. According to their blog post, it is to “make the private side of the app more fun”, or to encourage users to talk more, a.k.a. use the app more to communicate. This looks a little like one of a number of last ditch attempts to fight off the somewhat inevitable march of dedicated messaging apps like WhatsApp, but the unintended impact of this change will be to make community management/customer service a little easier on Twitter.

Whether this change makes the app a better communication tool or a more important location for customer service queries remains to be seen.

Andy