Twitter rolls out YouTube-like view count feature for tweets

Twitter announced that view counts for tweets are now visible on iOS and Android and that they’ll be coming soon to the web (I’ve already started to see them there). The feature lets you see how many times someone has looked at your tweet, or anyone else’s, though there are a few exceptions that we’ll cover in just a moment.

When you’re in the app, you now see view counters alongside the number of comments, retweets, and likes. According to a Twitter FAQ, not every tweet will have a visible view count. Community tweets, Twitter Circle tweets, and “older” tweets won’t have the data available.

As for what counts as a view, it seems like basically any time your tweet shows up on someone’s screen (even if it’s your own). Twitter says:

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.

It also adds that looking at a tweet from the web, then looking at it on your phone would count as two views.

When the feature initially started rolling out on Wednesday night, it was significantly more limited — one of my colleagues who got it early said he could only see view counts on his own tweets and only after clicking into them. That wasn’t particularly groundbreaking — you’ve long been able to turn on analytics for your account and see how many “impressions” your tweets were getting. And while it did put the analytics more in your face, the version showing up on Thursday that shows you everyone’s view counter gives us much more information than we had before.

When Musk announced the feature on December 1st, he implied that he was trying to make the platform’s text and image posts like video posts, which already had public view counts. He’s also said that it’s meant to show how “alive” the platform is, and that just looking at replies and likes doesn’t give you the full picture.

Adding more publicly visible information to a social network actually runs contrary to what other companies have been doing recently. Last year, Instagram and Facebook started letting users hide the number of likes their posts get, a feature it’d been testing for years. Even YouTube, whose public view counts have been a defining feature of the platform, has started hiding some info — in 2021, it hid public dislike counts, making it so only creators could see how many people had clicked the thumbs down button on their videos. The Verge