Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Social media offers businesses a great platform for improving their brand awareness, boosting their engagement, and getting more traffic, among other benefits. But some of the more overlooked uses for social media for marketing are lead generation, lead nurturing and for boosting your conversion rates.

And Twitter, in my experience, is one of the best platforms for finding leads. In this blog post, I’m going to share my best tips for how you can use Twitter to improve your conversions.

Twitter is about to make a big change to the way that tweets work, The Verge can independently confirm. Beginning September 19th, the company will cut down on exactly which types of content count toward the platform's 140-character limit. Media attachments (images, GIFs, videos, polls, etc.) and quoted tweets will no longer reduce the count. The extra room for text will give users more flexibility in composing their messages.

Twitter first announced plans to stop counting extras like photos, videos, and user polls toward the limit back in May, but gave no firm date on when the shift would occur. A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment when contacted by The Verge. The date comes from two sources familiar with the company's business, but plans for the rollout could change.

Another new adjustment to the character limit is that usernames will no longer count when they're at the beginning of replies, giving users additional room for discussion. It's unclear whether all of these changes will occur simultaneously; certain content types may gradually stop counting against the character limit in stages. But the company will at least kick off the move next Monday....

Twitter users consume news more heavily than any other social media users, according to a recent study by theAmerican Press Institute, Twitter and DB5. Nearly 9 in 10 Twitter users in the study (86%) say they use Twitter for news.

So, why are these Twitter followers so different than those on other social networks? And how do those who engage primarily in the news on Twitter react to advertising, branding and promoted Tweets?

The study, which surveyed 4,713 people online, aims to answer those questions and more. Here are some useful stats about how Twitter is used for news and key takeaways that can help you publish more effectively on Twitter:...