Twitter’s new character limit means more freedom for pharma marketers

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By Andrew Grojean, social media manager, Intouch Solutions

After years of tests and speculation about new character limits on Twitter, the platform has formally announced that the famous 140-character limit is no more. Now, tweets can include up to 280 characters, doubling the amount of content that can fit in each tweet.

Twitter’s previous limits have made it difficult for pharma to use the platform, due to restrictions on space for fair balance and important safety information (ISI). An increased character count may allow pharma marketers more freedom to use the platform while remaining FDA-compliant. This update significantly changes the way users and marketers will engage on Twitter.

Twitter was not designed to be a 140-character platform. 140 characters was an arbitrary limit imposed by the 160-character limit of SMS when Twitter launched in 2006. Twitter was built to be a messaging company, and it has evolved to become a media platform. This evolution and the changing behavior of Twitter users means the 140-character limit is not as necessary as it was more than a decade ago.

Over the past few years, Twitter has slowly softened the strict 140-character limit. Last year, Twitter stopped counting characters in replies and media, and it tested increasing the limit to 10,000 characters. While the 10,000-character test was never rolled out, it shows Twitter is open to giving users more control over their messaging.

In Twitter’s announcement, the company said that users with access to 280 characters continued to tweet below 140 characters most of the time. Historically, 9 percent of tweets in English hit the 140 character limit. In the 280-character tests, only 1 percent of tweets hit the limit. According to Twitter, “This shows that more space makes it easier for people to fit thoughts in a tweet, so they could say what they want to say, and send tweets faster than before.”

In addition, users and brands that tweeted more than 140 characters received more engagement (likes, retweets, @mentions) and gained more followers compared to their tweets under 140.

Many brands outside of pharma have already started to take advantage of the new feature.

News organizations such as ABC News (@ABC) are able to tweet longer quotes from sources and richer synopses for stories. Delta Airlines (@Delta) and NASA’s Goddard Space Center (@NASAGoddard) used their extra space to create pictures with emojis in tweets. JetBlue Airways (@JetBlue) has included more detailed flight information and support into their responses to customer concerns.

This update allows brands to focus more on the content of their messages than the limitations.

The increase to 280 characters creates new opportunities for pharma marketers.
• More relevant search results. In the past, users who wanted to post more than 140 characters had to rely on one of a few workarounds. Popular methods include uploading an image of text or using “tweetstorms,” a style of tweeting that breaks up one large message into shorter, successive tweets. Neither of these workarounds allow Twitter or search engines to index the messages properly, so tweets using these workarounds were often not surfaced in search results. Marketers leveraging this new feature may see a boost in the number of impressions on their tweets, since tweets can now include context to be more meaningful, and the message will be indexed in its entirety.
• Better classification and organization through hashtags. Hashtags allow brands to annotate their tweets with relevant keywords. These tags are searchable and aggregate similar content for users. With more space to add tags, brands can share messages and add any relevant tags, expanding the reach for those tweets. Brands should be wary of spamming hashtags that aren’t applicable to the tweet, but the added room should be especially helpful for any event or conference tweets with multiple hashtags.
• More robust customer service. Pharma brands should definitely consider jumping on board with Twitter customer service. Many companies often talk about the concepts of “beyond the pill,” “customer-centricity,” and “customer experience.” Twitter has made it easier to bring these concepts to life. Seventy-seven percent of people are likely to recommend a brand following a personalized customer service interaction on Twitter. Social customer service should no longer be ignored. Recent updates allow for custom welcome messages and user prompts in direct messages, direct-message buttons in tweets so users can more easily start conversations with brands, and customer service profiles to give brands the chance to put faces and names to individuals responding on behalf of the brand. More characters also allow brands to create more human and helpful responses, without requiring a redirect to another website or using short, robotic messages.
• Extra real estate for fair balance. The FDA’s draft guidance on character-constrained messaging only allowed for messages that provided a less than optimal user experience. Now, brands can use all 280 characters for any sponsorship disclaimers or fair balance. Unlike previous tests that truncated long tweets after 140 characters, this update will allow all 280 characters to be seen in a user’s feed.

 

Compliant Tweets

Brands that are unable to fit all the elements of full product promotion into 280 characters should still avoid using Twitter for branded messaging. The increase in characters is helpful, but does not guarantee that there is room for compliant messaging for every treatment.

The FDA guidance allows for a product’s benefit in character-constrained messaging, so long as it includes all of the following six elements.
• Brand name
• Generic name and/or active ingredients
• Non-misleading indication statement
• All contraindications (other than mere hypersensitivity to the active ingredients) and life-threatening risks
• Abbreviated risk statement
• Link to full risk information (and additional elements required of a product promotion, such as dosage form and quantitative ingredient information)

When in doubt, it’s helpful to reference this advice from the guidance: “If a firm concludes that adequate benefit and risk information, as well as other required information, cannot all be communicated within the same character-space-limited communication, then the firm should reconsider using that platform for the intended promotional message.”

Marketers should not rely on the cover image or profile picture to account for important safety information, since these images can be small and illegible on mobile devices.

Alternatives to full product promotion include reminder-formatted tweets on branded channels, where the indication is never mentioned, or unbranded, disease-awareness tweets on unbranded channels.

 

Recommendation

The increase from 140 to 280 characters provides an opportunity for many pharma brands to expand their interactions with users while remaining compliant in this highly regulated space.

This update may be particularly helpful for disease awareness, customer support, or corporate pharma assets with a branded component. Brand name and indication should still never be seen together in tweets without proper fair balance.

More freedom does not mean that every pharma brand should now be on Twitter, but marketers may now be able to participate in a space that’s historically been hostile for the industry.