Why Twitter's new ‘view count' feature is a double-edged sword for the creator economy

Elon Musk announced last week that Twitter is rolling out the 'view count' metric. The new feature is aimed at helping people see how many times a tweet has been seen.

Experts believe that while the new feature will help create more transparency in the influencer marketing ecosystem, it may also give rise to hate culture and discourage the creators' community to create more content on the platform as they won’t want their analytics to be out there for the world to see.

Mitesh Kothari

According to Mitesh Kothari, Co-founder and CCO, White Rivers Media, the new view count feature by Twitter can be favourable for digital content creators who can now show the actual reach of their content to the whole world. 

"The engagement on content in terms of likes, comments, or retweets, sometimes does not go as high as we would like but the number of impressions can give a clearer view of the amount of visibility of the content," Kothari added. 

Sahil Chopra

As per Sahil Chopra, Founder and CEO, iCubesWire, "The view count feature may become a go-to option for content creators and influencers keeping an eye on the view count of their tweets. In addition, the feature will help gauge the reach and engagement of content pieces and offer valuable insights.”

Priyanka Thakkar

On the contrary, Priyanka Thakkar, Senior Creative Strategist, Django Digital, had a different take on the matter. According to her, since the followers and brand partners of content creators and influencers will get a more transparent picture of their performance in the form of views, it might affect them negatively in a couple of ways.

"In case certain tweets by a creator/influencer don’t perform well in comparison to its views it will be fodder for trolling by their trolls/haters and add to the ‘hate culture’ on Twitter," said Thakkar. 

Furthermore, she said, "More importantly, it can affect their brand partnerships as it has the possibility to shift the focus from a follower base-driven selection of influencers/creators to influencers who get consistent high engagement in comparison to views. So, the creators will have to keep their quality and community engagement in check on a continuous basis to retain and attract brands."

In her opinion, this could negatively impact the creators' community participation on Twitter as it can be discouraging to the creators/influencers for their analytics to be out there for the world to see. 

Dev Batra

As per Dev Batra, Founder and CEO at Lyxel and Flamingo, the new feature will definitely impact influencers, content creators and individuals who maintain a strong voice on Twitter and have a high reach on the platform.

Furthermore, Batra opined, “Even if the tweet views numbers are lower than their estimates, at least it gives them clarity and allows them to understand what tweets give them better views and what don’t. I personally believe that without data, you are a ship at sea without a compass.”

Rashid Ahmed

According to Rashid Ahmed, Infectious Advertising's Head of Digital, the use of influencers in the advertising mix has often been hindered by real-world transparency. 

"Twitter’s move to make view count visible, across post types publicly, will enable brands and advertisers to review a potential influencer’s reach more accurately and then to track and measure a post’s reach," Ahmed added. 

Minal Rajak

Commenting on the impact of Twitter's new 'view count' feature on content creators and influencer market, Minal Rajak, Celebrity Strategist at Schbang, said, "A heavy impact will be created, there could be a possibility that Twitter gets back in the race as there was no promising metric to measure actual success on Twitter." 

Following the rollout of this feature, it can now become easy for Twitter users to identify which influencers have organic followers and viewership. These experts also gave their views on the same.

Keerthi R Kumar

Keerthi R Kumar, Business Head - South, FoxyMoron - the digital agency of the Zoo Media network, said, "If you have bots following your handle or many inactive followers following you then that is out there in a transparent manner for the world to see. Say you have a person with 50,000 followers and they only get 5,000 views for their tweets, then there is a sign." 

Similarly, Infectious Advertising's Ahmed said that as with most individuals who have a sizeable following, what they do and say tends to attract attention from people who share their interests. Influencers with a high number of followers, who don’t have suitably high enough views for their content when compared to their peers, might be viewed critically.

"On the other hand, users who come across highly viewed content and find the same to be relevant could be both influenced by the content and be motivated to follow the publisher," he added.

Stating her views on the same, Django Digital's Thakkar said, "I think it has the potential to level the playing field of the influencers' community as it has made analytical information accessible and transparent which makes an influencer more accountable to their followers and to their brand partners as well." 

She also asserted that on the flip side, it can demoralise influencers from spending time creating on the platform as other platforms are doing the opposite of Twitter, for example, last year Instagram rolled out an option to allow their users to hide their views and likes from their audience.

iCubesWire's Chopra pointed out that brands can now take measurable decisions when it comes to influencer marketing.

"With the help of the view count feature, brands can keep tabs on influencers' organic reach and engagement," Chopra added.

Maanesh Vasudeo

In the opinion of Maanesh Vasudeo, Senior Vice-President - Media Operations (Biddable Performance and Programmatic), LS Digital, in India, Twitter is not considered a major advertising platform but we are slowly evolving. This feature will actually help the influencers to identify who their target audience is and how they can strategise it.

‘View count’ impact on micro and nano influencers

Upon being asked what impact this feature will have on nano and micro-influencers on the micro-blogging platform, iCubesWire's Chopra said that it is going to be easier than ever for them to prove their worth and substantiate it with data.

The view count will enable brands to pick and choose relevant influencers based on their viewership, Chopra added.

FoxyMoron's Kumar expressed similar views when he said, "This move might just push the smaller influencers to grow at a rapid pace by doing something drastic or perish because they are not the big reach drivers for a branded activity."

On the contrary, Django Digital's Thakkar said that it can slow down the growth of nano and micro-influencers as once someone follows a Twitter user they are more focused on the opinions and conversations an influencer is having than their numbers.

"However, it can cause a lack of participation if their followers are constantly able to see the view count being higher than the likes/retweets count. The reason for this could be that the majority of social media behaviour is dictated to mimicking peer behaviour," Thakkar added.

As per Schbang's Rajak, when it comes to verified accounts, they already know that they are getting a high number of impressions but on the other hand, when it comes to micro-influencers, they would depend on view metric to test which content is viewed the most. Then, they can replicate the same to their other content to gradually increase their followers.

Moving ahead on the same chain of thought, Infectious Advertising's Ahmed said, "Nano and micro-influencers will be able to evaluate content that gets the most views for their niche or across categories and this might propel them to emulate better performing posts." 

Furthermore, Ahmed said that most nano and micro-influencers will be able to share verifiable information with potential sponsors and advertisers to generate more business. They will also be able to showcase view growth metrics and begin to change premiums for longer-duration engagements.

Notably, after the turbulent takeover of Twitter by Tesla CEO, Musk, many brands had shown concerns over advertising on the micro-blogging platform.

Earlier, in November, Elon Musk had said that Twitter will beat YouTube when it comes to sharing revenues with creators. 

Musk had announced this while having a conversation about what the future of the platform is going to look like.