We often hear about Twitter experimenting with new features, though not all of them necessarily make the cut. These days its experimenting with view counts which basically tells users how many people saw a particular tweet. This feature is similar to page views or post views on a Facebook page. Previously such stats were only shown to advertisers, so this is the first time that view counts are actually being opened up to the public.
For now the feature has only gone live for selected people. Twitter hasn’t said if and when it plans to roll it out for the entire user base. While the intention here might be to drive engagement, it may be a double edged sword. If a user notices that their tweets aren’t been seen by a lot of people, they may feel inclined to engage more with other users in hopes of gaining more followers, thus spending more time on the microblogging network.
On the other hand, it may put people off. Even if someone has a few hundred followers and their tweets are only being seen by 10 people on average, they might feel less inclined to tweet than they would have otherwise. This could be one of the reasons why Twitter may hold off on rolling out view counts for all users.
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