Twitter is giving fans eager to cram the most into their 140 characters a little more leash.
The social media company on Tuesday confirmed plans to tweak its character rules over the coming months to free up more space for words.
Once the changes are instituted, Twitter said @names and media attachments like photos, GIFs and videos will no longer count toward a user’s 140 character limit. Twitter said it will also make it easier for users to retweet or quote themselves, and will remove the need for the “.@” before another username to broadcast a tweet broadly. Tweets that began with a username were previously excluded from a user’s feed.
“Over the past decade, the Tweet has evolved from a simple 140-character text message to a rich canvas for creative expression featuring photos, videos, hashtags, Vines, and more,” senior product manager Todd Sherman wrote on Twitter’s official blog. “So, you can already do a lot in a Tweet, but we want you to be able to do even more.”
The move comes as Twitter hope to reignite user growth to catch up to other social media titans like Facebook.
Twitter, which celebrated its 10th birthday in March, currently has about 310 million monthly active users. Rival Facebook has nearly 1.65 billion.
Despite the return of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey last summer and the subsequent layoff of nearly 8 percent of its workforce, Twitter has still struggled.
In the first quarter 2016, Twitter’s revenue grew 36 percent year-over-year to $594.5 million, but missed analyst estimates of $607.8 million. The company’s net loss for the quarter was down to $79.7 million from $162.4 million the year prior.
Twitter has forecast revenue of $590 million to $610 million for the second quarter, well below analyst expectations from Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S of $677.57 million.
The impact of Twitter’s recent deal with the NFL to secure streaming rights for Thursday Night Football has yet to be seen. The social media company beat out Verizon and Amazon to win the streaming rights in April.
Twitter stocks were down 2.36 percent as of 3 p.m. Tuesday afternoon.
