Twitter Cofounder Suggests A Replacement For The Follower Count
“The dream metric is how many people saw your tweet,” says Ev Williams. Twitter's own Klout? — Via: @jonsteinberg — Twitter cofounder Ev Williams — who remains on the company's board — hinted Monday that follower counts …
Context & Ripple Effects
Twitter’s public measure of influence has already faced two credibility problems in the corpus: retweets were framed as more meaningful than raw follower totals in 2008, and Twitter was reported to be exploring ways to help users acquire followers in 2010. Those precedents separate audience size from actual distribution.
Williams remains on Twitter’s board, so his preference for a reach-based measure gives the company’s engagement debate added weight even though no product change is reported.
First-order effects
- Williams’ proposal shifts the benchmark for Twitter accounts from accumulated followers toward the number of people who see individual posts, putting Klout-style influence measures under pressure to demonstrate reach rather than just audience size.
Second-order effects
- Publishers, advertisers, and account owners would have a stronger reason to seek tweet-level audience data, while services built around follower growth would need to defend follower totals as a useful performance signal.
Third-order effects
- If Twitter makes reach visible, social influence measurement would move further from profile-level popularity toward distribution and engagement at the post level, reinforcing the earlier case for retweets over follower counts.
The trend: Social platforms are being pushed to replace easily accumulated audience-size metrics with measures that better reflect the distribution of individual posts.