By now, you’ve probably noticed that a new number is being shown underneath Tweets now with Likes and Retweets. In December, Twitter released a new public metric to all stats, the new metric being Tweet View Count. In the past, View Counts have been publicly visible on videos on the platform, but not on Tweets. Likewise, View Counts were available to the authors of Tweet, but again, the difference is now that these numbers are now public on every Tweet.
Twitter is rolling out View Count, so you can see how many times a tweet has been seen! This is normal for video.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 22, 2022
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.
This has sparked a lot of questions inside the social media analytics community and we are here to answer some of those questions for you.
What is the difference between the new View Count metric and the previous Impressions metric?
The answer to this is quite simple; there is no difference. The new View Count metric is simply what was the previous Impressions metric in Tweet analytics but renamed and now public. To verify this, we have A/B tested authenticated Tweets in Zoomph by comparing View Counts on Twitter to the Impressions metric displayed on our Zoomph social measurement dashboard and found the metrics to be the same.
Will Zoomph display the new View Count metric in real time?
Due to the structure of Twitter’s partner API and the way they are utilizing View Count on the platform, unfortunately, the number in Zoomph will not be accurate in real time. While Zoomph is collecting posts in real-time and constantly refreshing post metrics, Twitter will organically always be providing the most real-time count. We did find during our testing however that the lag was very minor in time difference and most importantly, that the metrics were still accurate after time passed and views slowed down on single Tweets.
Does this change Zoomph’s capabilities for non-authenticated accounts?
While View Count is now a public metric on Twitter, there has been no update to Twitter’s partner API that dictates our platform capabilities. Therefore, at this point in time, there are no changes to our capabilities in regard to non-authenticated Twitter accounts.
Will Zoomph be updating the Impressions metric title in its platform?
As of this point in time, we will be keeping the metric title as Impressions. With there being no update as of this moment to Twitter’s partner API, we have chosen to stay consistent in the language of our capabilities provided through our partner agreement. Should this change in the future, we will provide updates to all of our customers via our monthly customer newsletter and through your customer success representative.
If you have any further questions regarding Twitter’s new View Count metric and its impact on your reporting or any other general questions, do not hesitate to reach out to your customer success representative for assistance.
Header Photo by Chris J. Davis on Unsplash
