As of February 20th, 2013, you’re going to have two fewer characters to send a message on Twitter when you’re sharing a link. The t.co wrapper that Twitter is using to shorten web addresses is lengthening from 20 to 22 reserved characters. This means that any link you share will now take up two more spaces that you could previously use for letters.

The HTTP links will go from 20 to 22 and HTTPS (secure) links will go from 21 to 23 characters reserved for the t.co short-linking wrapper on Twitter. If you’re unfamiliar with the way this works, when you share a link on Twitter, it is automatically shortened, and takes up exactly 20 characters, leaving you 120 to tweet with. Now, you’ll have 118 (or 117 if it’s a secure link).

So, when you’re sharing tweets with links after that date, you’re going to have to slice them down by two more characters. Tweets without links will be unaffected – so no worries there.

Published by Michael Boguslavskiy

Michael Boguslavskiy is a full-stack developer & online presence consultant based out of New York City. He's been offering freelance marketing & development services for over a decade. He currently manages Rapid Purple - and online webmaster resources center; and Media Explode - a full service marketing agency.

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4 Comments

  1. I would just like to add that Shane Atkins wrote a great blog post that comes to mind after thinking about this a bit: http://shaneatkins.co.uk/2012/08/15/the-5-best-url-shorteners-for-twitter/

    Here he goes over some of the more popular and best URL shortners out there. Now would be a good time to take a look at which ones provide the shortest URL’s. The SingleFunction blog wrote about this back in 2009 (http://singlefunction.com/the-shortest-url-shorteners/) however it’s been a few years since then …

    Just wanted to add this to the post as a few extended reading options.

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