Twitter and Snapchat – the two social media platforms seem to be struggling lately. So, in order to gain more users, both of the social media platforms have decided to give themselves a new look.
Twitter is providing a 280-character limitation for nearly all its users, abandoning its iconic 140-character limit for the tweets. Whereas, Snapchat has also decided to undergo a revamp to make itself easier to use, hoping to attract more audiences.
Both Twitter and Snapchat companies announced their decisions to upgrade their social media platforms on Tuesday as they’re looking for ways to expand beyond their passionate but slow-growing fan bases.
At the end of the third quarter, Twitter had 330 million monthly users, up just 1% from the second quarter. Snapchat added 4.5 million daily users in the quarter to 178 million, which amounts to a 3% growth. The company does not report monthly user figures.
But these numbers seem to be pale as compared to other social media platforms like Facebook, which reported that its monthly users rose 16% to 2.07 billion.
Snap Inc, CEO, Mr. Spigel said, “The one thing that we have heard over the years is that Snapchat is difficult to understand or hard to use, and our team has been working on responding to this feedback.” He further said that they were currently redesigning their application to make it easier for the users to use Snapchat.
Meanwhile, Twitter appears to be freeing users from the 140-character limitation. As per the sources, the San Francisco Company said that 9% of the tweets written in English hot the limitation of 140-characters. As a result, people end up spending more time editing the tweets or didn’t tweet at all.
The move to limit in 280-characters was first started as a test in September.
Project Manager, Aliza Rosen, posted in a blog post saying, “People in the experiment told us that a higher character limit made them feel more satisfied with how they expressed themselves on Twitter, their ability to find good content, and Twitter overall.”
The text limit expansion will be available to all the users except for those tweeting in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. These users will still have the original text limit of 140 characters. The reason behind this has been said to be the use of fewer characters in those languages.
Mr. Spiegel has noted that: change does not come without risk. He said, “We don’t yet know how the behavior of our community will change when they begin to use our updated application. We’re willing to take that risk for what we believe are substantial long-term benefits to our business.”
What do you guys think about both Twitter and Snapchat adopting new looks? Do you think the move will help in gaining more users? Let us know your thoughts through the comments below.
Reference: Glocal Khabar, The Hindu, WHIO