Today, Twitter announced a new feature. No, it wasn’t Twitter music (that is rumored to be coming soon). Instead, they added Twitter line breaks.
What are Twitter line breaks?
Twitter line breaks are a way to spread your Twitter message across a few lines. As you can see from the above photo, you can break up your tweets character by character. If you want to, you can also break up your tweets word by word until you’ve used up all 140 characters.
While the former case is a little extreme for Twitter line breaks, it’s still useful.
Caveats to Twitter line breaks
While I see a lot of benefits to using line breaks – for example, you can now break up Follow Friday tweets to make them much easier to read. Twitter line breaks don’t work with third-party apps like HootSuite at the moment. For people who rely on third-party apps, you’ll have to wait to get your Twitter line break on.
While Twitter line breaks have a lot of usefulness in your Twitter campaigns, I expect to see a lot of tweets like the one above. There’s nothing wrong with displaying your tweets in a vertical line, just make sure you don’t go overboard.
How can I benefit from using Twitter line breaks?
Besides a lack of third-party app support and the fact that some people might consider this more of a nuisance than a feature, Twitter line breaks are still very useful in your Twitter strategy.
Here are a few ways you can use Twitter line breaks in your tweets.
- Promote new followers with Follow Friday and make your tweets easier to read
- Break up important numbers in your tweets
- If you’re a sports team, I can see lots of team chants combined with a list of Twitter handles
- List out the features and benefits of your product
- My personal favorite: Combine a Vine video with a tweet using line breaks for the ultimate tweet
Question: How would you apply Twitter line breaks to tweets for your business or would you? Leave a comment below.