Twitter Starts Rolling Out Public View Counts on Tweets
- Laurent Giret
- Dec 22, 2022
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Twitter has started rolling out view counts on all tweets. Until now, Twitter users could see that information for their own tweets, but Twitter CEO Elon Musk believes that making that information public may help to change the public perception regarding Twitter usage.
“This is normal for video,” Musk emphasized. “Shows how much more alive Twitter is than it may seem, as over 90% of Twitter users read, but don’t tweet, reply or like, as those are public actions.”
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Twitter is rolling out View Count, so you can see how many times a tweet has been seen! This is normal for video.
Shows how much more alive Twitter is than it may seem, as over 90% of Twitter users read, but don’t tweet, reply or like, as those are public actions.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 22, 2022
Here, Musk is echoing the popular “90-9-1” Internet rule, which basically says that 90% of people on the Internet are passive lurkers, 9% of them will just change or update content, and only the remaining 1% will be creating content. Back in April, months before he decided to acquire Twitter, Musk wondered if Twitter was “dying” and highlighted that most of the top accounts on the platform “tweet rarely and post very little content.”
Twitter already displays the number of replies, likes, retweets, and quote tweets on every tweet. Adding information about how many times tweets have been seen should be useful if you really care about this data. Since he acquired the company, Elon Musk has repeated many times that Twitter usage has been increasing, and the recent FIFA world cup has been another high point for the platform.
If Twitter is now making view counts public on all tweets, the platform did recently remove the ability to see from which app a tweet has been published. This information could be used to see if tweets had been scheduled, or if they had been published from an unexpected device. As you may remember, Oprah Winfrey once praised Microsoft’s original Surface RT tablet on Twitter while tweeting… from an iPad.