Not so sure what to make of this. Today, Twitter has launched a public test of a new ‘Views’ count on some users’ Tweets. These Views display the total number of times that each of your Tweets was seen in the app. So, it’s basically like YouTube’s view count, only for Tweets? See, that’s why we drew a Grayline at the start of this piece.
Tweet Views
User @chimponsey posted an example showing the feature in action. In the expanded Tweet activity display, some users are now also seeing a ‘Views’ listing, alongside ‘Retweets’ and ‘Likes’. The count is also indicated by an eye icon in the main Tweet stream. Pretty cool, right? Thinking that people are seeing your Tweets and not engaging with them, you’ll know for sure, which could do wonders for your self-esteem or, you know, demolish it completely.
From a technical standpoint, the feature basically adds nothing new, in that you can already view your Tweet impression count in the full Tweet analytics display, which you can access via the graph icon on your Tweets. ‘Views’ and ‘Impressions’, of course, are not the exact same thing, but as confirmed by Twitter, this is the data that people are seeing. So why put it in a general info display then?
As an initial guess, we can assume that this is part of Twitter’s ongoing effort to demonstrate that it’s more popular and influential than most people take it for. Twitter, for example, currently has 238 million monetizable daily active users, putting it well behind Facebook (1.9B) and Snapchat (347M). In short, almost every other major social app has more users than Twitter, which has struggled to grow its audience over time.
However, according to Twitter, this doesn’t tell the whole story, as many people are regularly consuming Tweet content, despite not logging into the app. At one stage, Twitter even reported that its ‘Logged out’ monthly user count was at 500 million, which is a significant story for Twitter to tell because it points to the broader influence of the app, which could make it a more valuable consideration for brands and content creators.
Maybe, by making Tweet view counts more present, that will help to reiterate this – because maybe, even though you think that your Tweet only gets like 10k likes, 10,000 people actually saw it. Stat-wise, it adds very little, but a deeper analysis of that example would indicate that your Tweet actually generated 10,000 unique user views, which is a parameter marketers and advertisers would be thrilled about.
The Wrap
Perhaps by making these insights more front of mind, that could help bring out more positive effects. Twitter really needs to know now is whether having data more immediately available then reduces people’s propensity to Tweet. If you’re seeing that a lot more people are viewing your Tweets than you’d thought, because your other engagement stats are low, that could make you feel like you’re not great at Tweeting, seeing you share less as a result. If that happens, Twitter will no doubt switch it back, but it could also give users more context as to its true potential.
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