Twitter imitates video platforms, introducing “views” and “impression counts”

While Twitter looks for a replacement for its interim CEO, Elon Musk, who is also the company’s owner, he continues to tinker with the user interface (UI), which has some users wondering what he is doing to the once-distinctive microblogging platform and why?

Retweeting another user’s posting of a well-known TikTok video, @oliviatheehye jokes, “Twitter UI by next seek”.

It is a clear allusion to Musk’s efforts to change Twitter’s user interface (UI) to make it more interesting and engaging, emulating how quickly developing platforms like TikTok and Snapchat have been generating enormous amounts of impressions.

Musk asked Twitter’s engineering team to include a “view count” along with the quote, retweet, and like metrics at the bottom of each user’s tweet in the past 24 hours.

This is common for video, purportedly referring to videos on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, @elonmusk gushed. “You can check how many times a tweet has been watched! “, he exclaimed.

Musk continued by saying that the change “demonstrates how much more alive Twitter is than it may seem, as over 90% of Twitter users read, but do not tweet, reply, or like, as those are public activities.”

Then, in one of his most recent public actions, he tweeted a Twitter poll asking people to vote on whether the new tweet impression counts should “remain on left,” where they had been first placed, or “move to the right.”

With fewer active users going through to improved metrics like “engagements,” “detail expands,” “new followers,” and “profile visits,” it appears that the new tweet impressions statistic is designed to increase virality.

Additionally, it looks to be an upsell promotion urging people to “convert to professional” accounts.