A few days go, Twitter removed the device labels, so people can’t no longer see what devices people are using to tweet, because Elon Musk, the head of Twitter, says it’s a waste of screen space and computer resources. Today, the social media company added a new but minor feature.
With this new “View Count” feature, you can find out how many times people look at your tweet.
But this new feature is only available for iOS and Android users for now. It will be coming soon for web users. Although, we can already see the view counts on Elon Musk’s tweet.
Not every tweets will have a view count though. Twitter’s FAQ said Community Tweets, Twitter Circle Tweets, and older Tweets will not have this feature.
Whats count as a view and how are they calculated? According to Twitter:
Anyone who views your Tweet counts as a view, regardless of where they see your Tweet (e.g. Home, Search, Profiles, Tweets embedded in articles, etc.) or whether or not they follow you. Even an author looking at their own Tweet counts as a view.
Multiple views may be counted if you view a Tweet more than once, but not all views are unique. For example, you could look at a Tweet on web and then on your phone, and that would count as two views.
Musk did this because he wanted to demonstrate how “alive” the platform is and that you can’t get the whole picture by just looking at comments and likes.
This view count feature is not really new. Previously, you can find out how many views or impressions you were getting on your tweets by going to Twitter’s analytics site, but those information are only available to you. Now everyone can see how many views you are getting on your tweet.