A banner with the Twitter logo hangs on the facade of the New York Stock Exchange in New York the day after the company went public.When Mallory Nelson joined Twitter in 2009, it wasn’t to keep up with her friends or to track the latest updates from the social media platform’s hordes of celebrity users. It was to get away from her mother, who recently had joined Facebook and forced her daughter to “friend” her.
But to Nelson and many others who converted to Twitter from social media platforms like Friendster or Myspace, the site’s per-post limit of 140 characters – letters, numbers or symbols – seemed overly restrictive at first. Ten years after its public launch on July 15, 2006, however, Twitter’s emphasis on brief, in-the-moment communication and rapidly updating newsfeeds has dramatically changed online content sharing, says Nelson, now 26 and the director of social media at GreenPages Interactive, a Chattanooga-based marketing company.
“It kind of developed a new thing where people aren’t willing to read a paragraph or two paragraphs,” she says. “They’re looking for shorter messages. They want to get to the meat and know what you’re trying to say in fewer characters and then move on. That changed the way people spoke and posted.”
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With 310 million active monthly users, Twitter is the world’s fourth most-popular social media site after Facebook (1.6 billion monthly users), YouTube (1 billion users) and Instagram (400 million users), according to CNN Money.