Twitter’s new tweet frequency feature shows how many times any user tweets per month, which should make it easier for you to determine whether to follow them.
- What’s 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 seeking engagement on social media, it’s imperative that you follow people who regularly share new content. Without this helpful feature, avoiding accounts that rarely publish tweets on the service is a lot of work. Besides, knowing how many times an account tweets per month could help you avoid fake accounts Elon Musk has been talking about, such as bots.
- What to do? If you’re included in this test, you can visit anyone’s profile in the Twitter app or on the web and see their monthly tweet frequency at the top of the Tweets section. If you’re not part of the test, you’ll need to wait until the feature becomes more broadly available.
Can you see how many times a user tweets per month?
A Twitter spokesperson has confirmed this test to TechCrunch, saying it’s part of “an ongoing experiment in which we want to learn how providing more context about the frequency of an account’s tweets can help people make more informed decisions about the accounts they choose to engage with.
We hope Twitter launches this feature for everyone. Looking at it as hard as we did, we couldn’t spot any negative aspects to it. If you couldn’t care less about other people’s tweet frequency, simply ignore this number and you’ll be just fine.
But for folks who do care about such things, however, tweet frequency could be a useful metric in determining whether they should follow someone on the service or not. We can think of several ways this could be useful.
Maybe you’re the quiet type who hates being inundated with countless tweets from the accounts they follow. In that case, you’d want to follow people who tweet moderately. Conversely, folks who turn to their timelines many times per day to keep tabs on what’s going on might want to follow accounts that tweet frequently versus those that barely tweet at all. Read: How to stop displaying your birthday on Twitter
A useful metric to avoid bots and spam accounts
Either way, Twitter now gives you a new metric to make it easier for people to make those kinds of decisions. Keep in mind that this feature is currently a limited test. It’s not a publicly released feature, yet. There’s no way to get this feature other than being included in this test, which is at Twitter’s sole discretion.
A small number of users who have the tweet frequency can find the new metric at the top of the Tweets section on user profiles. If you’re not included 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 kill his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter because the company wouldn’t come clean on the number of bots.
Fake and spam accounts publish an insane number of tweets per month so this new feature could make it a lot easier to weed out bots from your following list.