Twitter’s new tweet frequency feature shows you how many times any user tweets per month, which should make it easier for you to determine whether or not to follow them.
- What is happening? Twitter is testing a new feature with a small number of users that allows anyone to see the number of tweets per month for any account.
- Why care? If you’re looking to get involved on social media, be sure to follow the people who share new content on a regular basis. Without this useful feature, avoiding accounts that rarely tweet on the service is very difficult. Also, knowing how many times per month an account tweets can help you avoid the fake accounts Elon Musk talked about, like bots.
- What to do? If you participate in this quiz, you can visit someone’s profile on the Twitter app or on the web and see their monthly tweet frequency at the top of the Tweets section. If you are not participating in testing, you will have to wait until the feature becomes more available.
Do you see how many times a user tweets per month?
A spokesperson for Twitter confirmed this test to TechCrunch, saying it is part of “an ongoing experiment in which we want to learn how providing more context about an account’s tweet frequency can help people make more informed decisions about the accounts they want to interact with.”
We hope Twitter rolls out this feature for everyone. Looking at it as closely as we did, we could not find any negative aspects in it. If you don’t care about other people’s tweet frequency, just ignore that number and you’ll be fine.
However, for people who care about such things, tweet frequency can be a useful metric in determining whether they should follow someone on the service or not. We can think of several ways in which this can be useful.
Maybe you’re the quiet type who hates being bombarded with countless tweets from the accounts they follow. In this case, you’ll want to follow people who tweet moderately. Conversely, people who access their timeline many times a day to keep track of what’s going on may want to follow accounts that tweet a lot, rather than those that don’t tweet much. Read: How to stop showing birthday on Twitter
A useful metric to avoid bots and spam accounts.
In any case, Twitter is now giving you a new metric to make these decisions easier for people to make. Please be aware that this feature is currently a limited test. This is not yet a publicly released feature. There is no other way to get this feature than by being included in this test, which is left to Twitter’s discretion.
A small number of users who have tweet frequency can find the new metric at the top of the tweet section in user profiles. If you’re not participating in the test, you won’t have access to anyone’s tweets per month metric.
Given Twitter’s huge problem with bots, spam accounts, meme accounts and the like, this is a welcome improvement. Elon Musk wants to end his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter because the company didn’t tell the truth about the number of bots.
Fake and spam accounts post an insane amount of tweets per month, so this new feature can make it much easier to weed out bots from your list of followers.