You probably get tons of “happy birthday” messages on Facebook every year when your special day rolls around. Now you can have that experience on Twitter as well.
The company on Monday rolled out a new option that lets you add your birthday to your Twitter profile.
The feature is, of course, totally optional, so if you don’t want people knowing your birthday, no worries. You can also opt to add your birth month and day, and leave off the year if you just don’t want people knowing how old you are.
To add your birth date to your Twitter profile, just choose the “Edit profile” option on Twitter.com. It will show up on the left side of your profile, right under the line that says when you joined Twitter.
While most Twitter profile information — like your bio, location, website, and photo — is always public, you can control who on Twitter can see your birthday. The site gives you several options on this front: you can make your birth date public so everyone sees it, choose to show just your followers, just people you follow, or mutual followers (people who follow you and you follow back).
But beware: if you add your birthday to your Twitter profile, you may start seeing some birthday-themed ads around your big day.
“We will use your birthday to show you more relevant content, including ads,” Twitter said in a Help Center article about the new feature.
Meanwhile, Twitter also this month is dropping the 140-character limit in Direct Messages. With this change, you can now send DMs that are up to 10,000 characters in length.
