At last, a peek behind the curtain.
According to reports from Twitter users across the service, the social network is experimenting with showing users the exact number of views each tweet receives.
The new feature was first noticed by The Verge and, according to users who've been selected as part of the test (so far it only seems to be rolled out on iOS devices), it looks like this:
Advertisers aside, most users across all social networks are kept in the dark when it comes to the most important engagement metric of all: knowing how many people actually saw what you're sharing.
While plenty of indicators exist (likes, retweets, comments, favorites), the vast majority of users know very little about what happens when they broadcast an update out into the world.
"When you post on a social network, it's almost like trying to give a presentation from behind a curtain. You know who's invited and supposed to be listening, but you don't know who is actually there in the room," Stanford assistant professor Michael S. Bernstein told BuzzFeed last July after releasing a study that showed Facebook users drastically underestimate the size of their general audience, in part because they're afraid to know the truth.
The decision to show users the number of views a post receives is just the latest in a long series of updates by Twitter designed to increase engagement and bring users back each month. The service recently placed favorite, retweet, and follow buttons prominently inside user timelines on its mobile apps, which, according to Twitter, has increased favorites and retweets by more than 35%. This increase in interactions might also be the reason Twitter finally feels comfortable making this type of metric public.
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