There has been a lot of talk about Twitter changes in the past couple of weeks – in particular, the news that Twitter is changing the way it counts characters in your tweets – but you’d be forgiven if you haven’t quite figured out exactly how it’s going to work yet. It took us a while! And even The New York Times got it wrong:

Twitter’s announcement that it’s giving users new ways to fit more stuff into their tweets should be exciting, but it also left a lot of people scratching their heads and unsure about what’s happening. So, we figured we’d put together a blog post that outlines exactly what’s changing – and what’s not!

Usernames won’t count when you press reply

Up until now, when you’ve replied to someone’s tweet, the username (like @shakesocial) that appears at the beginning of your reply counts against your 140 characters.

The available number of characters for this @-reply drops from 140 to 125 to accommodate the username at the beginning

That’s not going to happen anymore.

Now whenever you reply to someone’s tweet, their username will still be at the beginning – but it won’t count against your 140 characters.

This is also where a lot of confusion came from – so here’s the full explanation.

The announcement on Twitter’s official blog wasn’t quite as clear as it could have been, but their explanation for developers sets the record straight:

The ONLY time that usernames don’t count against your 140 characters is when they show up automatically as part of a reply.

If you write a new, non-reply tweet that starts with someone’s username, that username counts against your 140 characters. If you mention a user in the body of a tweet, that username counts against your 140 characters, too! The only time it won’t count is if you click the reply button.

So don’t worry – people can’t be spam-tastic and compose tweets with infinite numbers of usernames in them. Thankfully!

Media attachments won’t count towards your limit

Twitter’s also going to stop counting media attachments against your 140-character limit.

Historically, media attachments like photos, polls, videos and GIFs have counted against your character limit. That’s all changing – now you’ll be able to add media to a tweet and still have 140 characters to work with! So you can start adding photos to your heart’s content!

Self-retweeting is now a thing

Yep, Twitter’s letting us all get that bit more egotistical – we’ll soon be allowed to retweet ourselves! Any of your own tweets would have the ‘retweet’ button grayed out and unclickable, but that’s all changing. You’ll even be able to quote one of your own tweets so you can add to and expand on something you’ve said – pretty cool.

Full stops are no longer needed! Well, kinda…

Until now, when you composed a new tweet that started with someone’s username, the only way it would show up in a follower’s timeline was if they followed both you and the person you’re tweeting to. But what if you want to post a tweet that everyone in your audience will see just like normal, while starting that tweet with someone’s username?

The most common workaround has always been to add a full stop in front of the person’s username, like so:

Now when you write a new tweet, you can start it with a username and it’ll still show up in your followers’ timelines like any other tweet would – no punctuation workarounds required.

Here’s the thing that’s easy to miss, though: this only works with new tweets, not replies. If you want a reply to show up in all of your followers’ timelines, you’ll have to retweet it – good job you can now retweet yourself!

Coming soon…

Twitter have stated that these changes will be rolled out over the coming months so they’re not here yet but they will be, so keep a look out. And if you’re still not sure about any of it, give us a shout!