We’ve all heard the rumours about Twitter’s recent plans to greatly expand their character limit from 140 to 10,000, but what does it mean and why is relevant to you?

Well, for marketers, this is good news. Twitter has been searching for new ways to boost engagement with its current users and invite new ones for a while now, and this just might work!

While the move was met with initial outrage for long-time Twitter fans who have learned to adapt to the 140 character constraint, marketers have identified it as a great opportunity to engage with users.

We’ve embraced Twitter for what it is – a way to post simple, quick updates and engage with friends and followers. In business terms, this is great. However, if current plans go ahead, Twitter will become a new way to publish all of your content in one place without relying on other publishing platforms and restrictions. So, Twitter becomes a publisher within its own right.

If Twitter does this well, users will be able to consume more content, without needing to click on links that lead to other websites. This is another opportunity for a potential bonus – when someone clicks a link to leave Twitter, Twitter has no way to record their engagement levels and track their actions. By publishing the content on Twitter, the site will have more data for analytics, which is good news for advertisers. Of course, we are expecting for there to be some sort of charge in place for promoted articles.

For eCommerce brands who use social media as a way to draw people in to their website, their practice will remain mostly the same. Although, the kind of content they can create to redirect users to their websites will have huge potential to improve. An article in a tweet could carry a call-to-action button to either redirect to a featured product or possibly buy directly via Twitter.

So, we can start to think of Twitter as more than a way to publish a quick headline to attract readers to the real content, to more of a content sharing website, while keeping all of the familiar things we know and love about it already.

Let us know what you think of the plans @webdesignne1