Twitter Cofounder Suggests A Replacement For The Follower Count →
Twitter cofounder Ev Williams — who remains on the company’s board — hinted Monday that follower counts may soon become the second most important number to users.
“The thing I think would be more interesting than followers is… retweets,” clarifying that a simple measure of followers “doesn’t capture your distribution.”
“The dream metric,” he said, “is how many people saw your tweet.”
(via BuzzFeed)
This will be really interesting as Twitter looks to bring its business back to metrics. To me, this move looks to support advertising and marketing programs as Twitter looks to become more of a publishing platform.
I use about 3 different tools (social monitoring, social metrics) to bring together Twitter analytics data for our company. We use them differently to test and validate the data but we’re desperate for a more accurate, centralized solution.
Twitter could offer an interesting alternative and trusted source for the metrics - all in one location.
One quick win in this area for Twitter could be on reach measurements. It would be hugely beneficial to brand tracking and measurement on social if Twitter can get to ‘true’ reach - not just approximate reach (found in current tools) which over-estimates exposure by including anyone who ‘could have’ theoretically (i.e. each follower of the tweeter and retweeters) seen the post.
True reach alone would help support the social media ROI story and help marketers better understand the true journey of a tweet.
