Made any New Year's Resolutions yet? If you do social media for your nonprofit, one of them should be to tighten up the length of your Tweets containing links beginning in February.
Twitter announced on Thursday that they'll be expanding the length of links included in Tweets by two characters:"We’re going to be extending the maximum length of t.co wrapped links from 20 to 22 characters for non-https URLs, and 21 to 23 characters for https URLs."
That goes for links that Twitter shortens for you when you use their user interface. It also goes for links from other link shortening services like bit.ly or Hootsuite's ow.ly. Twitter wraps each of these urls in its own t.co link while keeping the original link visible to your readers. That means that those links end up being 20 characters, or 21, respectively - even if the original link was shorter.
Until February, that is, when they get kicked up to 22 and 23.
What does that leave us to do? Come February, you'll need to tighten up:
Donations
Events
Petitions
Forms
Shop
Directories