It's very funny because it just makes it more apparent that twitter does not actually drive traffic. Every tweet is like 100k views - 0 comments - 1 share - 10 likes
Bad news if you want to attract advertisers that care about engagement
For people who never did a social media management before:
So Twitter already had this functionality. There was a little button you could click, on your own tweets, and it would show you how many views a tweet got, how many comments, and all that. It would also tell you how many clicks the link got. And, if you're smart, whatever page that click or app install or whatever is for has Google Analytics installed so you know how many people bought your widget who came in through Twitter.
There is a TON of variability to social posts. Stuff with images gets more traction than a huge wall of text. People will sit around and watch a video if the opening is interesting or it's from someone they care about (like if BTS posts a video, more people will want to watch that than if an oil company posts a video). But a rule of thumb, that is consistent across ALL platforms, is that a 1% engagement rate is good. Very good, if it's someplace like Facebook.
What is an engagement rate? It is all the engagements/interactions the post can have (the sum of likes/faves + shares + comments + clicks of the link + etc) divided by the views, then turned into a percent (so X 100).
So is engagement rate the be-all-end-all metric for social media marketing? Not at all! People do it for lots of reasons. Coca Cola does ads to remind you Coke exists, so they test that by doing marketing surveys or whatever. A video game app wants you to click the link and then install the app from the app store. A stupid t shirt company wants you to land on their site and buy the stupid t shirt. A GOOD social media marketer looks at whatever number measures success for whatever thing it is they want to accomplish and compares that to industry benchmarks to determine if they're successful or not.
But a lot of people don't know social media. A lot of old people don't. They just want to see the number go up. They see you have 1.1 M fans on Facebook, so why did this post for the new product not get 1.1 M views? Or 1.1 M likes? Why did it only get 1,000 likes? Well, a lot of those fans are bots, or duplicate accounts (Fb had a weird thing at the time with sub-pages and how it counted fans). Also not everyone goes on Facebook every single day. Not every post shows up for them because of The Algorthim. Not everyone is in the market for [product] and is gonna care we announced [new product]. Some people just...don't like/comment/share anything. There are so many factors.
But your old man boss loses his mind that you are ONLY getting 1% engagement on social media! 1% is awful! If profit only went up 1%, he'd lose his job, so you better do better! Or they focus on the totally wrong number, like views. So you do something stupid like "post an emoji in the comments if you see this :) " to artificially increase the numbers to make your boss happy.
But the actual average social media user isn't stupid. They see stuff like that and roll their eyes and ignore it. We've all seen those cringey try-hard brand accounts, or someone try to astroturf Pringles on Reddit, and it makes most users think less of them. But they're not the ones writing your performance review, so you do whatever ass-backward thing you gotta do to get the "right" numbers up while you question your line of work.
PUBLICLY showing views for a tweet serves no purpose besides going "haha look at you no one engaged with your post!" The only place that does something like this is someplace like YouTube that has video views. But that doesn't tell you how many people watched the WHOLE video, or who fast forwarded through the ad read, or other metrics that the creator needs to make better content. ("better").
But by knowing what EVERYONE's views are, you can now see your competitor's views and know what their engagement rate is. Which...gosh, that sounds so fucking hostile. That's going to make people look at what their competitors are doing and guess things like ad spend and....god what a mess.