Snap, Twitter hope updates will lure in more users

More characters per tweet and a new look for Snapchat are part of their push to catch Facebook

SAN FRANCISCO— Struggling social-media darlings Twitter and Snapchat are taking on new looks as the services seek wider audiences in the shadow of Facebook.

Twitter is rolling out a 280-character limit for nearly all its users, abandoning its iconic 140-character limit for tweets. And Snapchat, long popular with young people, will undergo a revamp in hopes of becoming easier to use for everyone else.

Both services announced the moves Tuesday as they look for ways to expand beyond their passionate, but slow-growing fan bases.

Twitter has said that 9 per cent of tweets written in English hit the 140-character limit. People ended up spending more time editing tweets or didn’t send them out at all. By removing that hurdle, Twitter is hoping people will tweet more, drawing more users in.

Waking up to the news Wednesday, Germany’s justice ministry wrote that it can now tweet about legislation concerning the transfer of oversight responsibilities for beef labelling.

The law is known in German as the Rindf lei sc he ti kettie rung sue berwa chungs auf gabe nu e bert ra gun gs ge setz.

Munich police, meanwhile, said that “at last” they won’t need abbreviations to tweet about accidents involving forklift drivers, or Nie der flu rfo er der fa hrz eu gfuehrer.

Others were not impressed, including at least one who quoted Shakespeare: “Brevity is the soul of wit.”

And, as Snap Inc. CEO Evan Spiegel noted, change does not come without risk.

“We don’t yet know how the behaviour of our community will change when they begin to use our updated application,” he said.

“We’re willing to take that risk for what we believe are substantial longterm benefits to our business.”

Snap, Snapchat’s parent company, did not provide details on the upcoming changes.

During the third quarter, Twitter averaged 330 million monthly users, up just 1 per cent from the previous quarter. Snapchat added 4.5 million daily users in the quarter to 178 million, which amounts to a 3-per-cent growth. The company does not report monthly user figures.

Those numbers pale next to socialmedia behemoth Facebook, which reported that its monthly users rose 16 per cent to 2.07 billion.

“The one thing that we have heard over the years is that Snapchat is difficult to understand or hard to use, and our team has been working on responding to this feedback,” Spiegel said.

“As a result, we are currently redesigning our application to make it easier to use.”

His comments came on a conference call with industry analysts after the company posted the lacklustre user-growth numbers and revenue that fell well short of Wall Street expectations.

Snapchat needs to grow its user base beyond 13- to 34-year-olds in the U.S., France, the U.K. and Australia, Spiegel said. This, he said, includes Android users, people older than 34 and what he called “rest of world” markets.

Meanwhile, Snap said Wednesday that Chinese internet company Tencent has acquired a 10-per-cent stake in the company. Tencent runs the WeChat messaging app, as well as online payment platforms and games. Earlier this year, Tencent bought a 5-per-cent stake in Tesla Inc.

As for Twitter, the move to 280 characters was first started as a test in September.