Snapchat and Twitter adopting new looks for users| smarttechbuzz

Snapchat and Twitter adopting new looks for users:

A few struggling social-media people like Snapchat and Twitter adopting new looks if they want to gain more users.

Twitter is changing to a 280-character limit for nearly all its users, instead of its iconic 140-character limit for tweets.

And Snapchat, long an app popular with youth, will undergo a new transform to make itself easier to use, in the hope of attracting a large audience.

Both companies announced the statements on Tuesday as they look better ways to expand beyond their passion but also considering slow-growing fan bases.

At the third quarter end, Twitter had 330 million monthly users,with an increase of 1% from the second quarter. Snapchat added 4.5 million daily users to 178 million, which has 3% growth. The company does not report monthly figures of the users.

But those numbers pale in social media in front of Facebook, which had monthly users increase 16% to 2.07 billion.

“The one thing that we heard was Snapchat is difficult to understand or hard to use, so our team has been working on this feedback,” Snap Inc. CEO Evan Spiegel said. “As a result, we are redesigning our application to use in a easy way.”

Mr.spiegal said that Snapchat needs to increase its user base beyond the age of 13 to 34 year olds within the U.S., France the U.K. and Australia. He said, includes Android users, people older than 34 years and he called “rest of world” markets.

Twitter appears to be banking that by freeing users from the 140-character straitjacket, to gain popularity of its platform. The San Francisco company says that only 9% of tweets written in English hit the 140-character limit. People ended up spending more time in editing their tweets or didn’t tweet them out at all.

The strategy to change the character limit to 280 characters was first started as an experiment in September.

“People told us that a higher character limit made them feel more comfortable by which they expressed themselves on Twitter and their ability to find good content” said project manager Aliza Rosen in her blog post .

The expansion to 280-character tweets will be implemented to all users except to the people who are tweeting in Chinese, Japanese and Korean still have the original character limit.

And Mr. Spiegel stated change does not come without risk.

“We don’t yet know how the behaviour of our users will change when they use our newly updated application,” he said. “We’re willing to take that risk for what we believe the long-term benefits to our business in the future.”