Ever had a bit more to say but hit the 140 character limit on Twitter? Spent a few minutes trimming your tweet down to acceptable levels? Me too. While there’s still not an official way to write more than 140 characters (nor will there ever be, really), there is a little hack you should know about. It’s called Tall Tweets and is from Amit Agarwal, the same guy who brought you the other fun tool we just showcased called Sleeping Time (shows you when your Twitter friends sleep – very fun!)
How Tall Tweets Works
Tall Tweets is a simple tool that turns your long tweet into an image. It’s very useful for cross-posting to other image-centric social networks like Pinterest and Tumblr in my opinion. But really, the benefit here is to not have to spend as much time formatting. You can actually focus on the content of your tweet and less on making sure every hashtag and username is correct. So, definitely worth trying out!
There is another option to ‘Tweet As Text’ where the service will chop up your lengthy text and then tweet it out piece-by-piece. I’m personally less of a fan of this option as a series of tweets that don’t make a lot of sense unless you read every … single … one … is just annoying in my stream. Just my opinion.
The only problems I see are that @mentions don’t work (obviously) in the ‘tall tweet’ because it’s an image. However, they do work if you include hashtags and @mentions in the beginning of the tweet. Users can then click the ‘View Photo’ Twitter card to view the full ‘tall tweet’ and you should be all set!
What Tall Tweets Look Like
Below is a tweet that contains the full text of this post you just read! Want to try it yourself? Click here to check out Tall Tweets.
Very cool Amit. I always find your stuff useful. Going to check this out now. Thanks!
But the problem is that these tweets are not searchable!
I love “140 characters” – I have to express briefly, concisely and specifically.
Very interesting, but doesn’t that defeat one of the most useful aspects of Twitter? The short and quick message to as many people as you can at once is the purpose of twitter. I think if you start sending longer tweets then less and less people will read them, making your tweet a silent chirp when its message is ignored. Twitter isn’t email, nor is it a useful place for conversation or chatting. Neat idea, but I think it is trying to make Twitter something it’s not.
This is really impressive, I am using twitter from such a long time, but I was unaware of the fact that we can write longer tweets also like this. Thanks for the tutorial.