Twitter testing ‘tweets per month’ counter to display on profiles

Twitter is testing a new feature that displays how many times a user tweets per month on their profile page.

The “tweets per month” counter was spotted by some users who have been granted access to the feature. The counter may help users determine whether they want to follow someone or not.

Engineers researching developments on the social media platform had previously noted the feature in late June, but now many more users have found they have access to the counter.

A Twitter spokesperson said the feature is part of an “ongoing experiment”, according to TechCrunch.

The spokesperson said the company aims to learn from these tests how providing more context about the frequency of an account’s tweets can help users make informed decisions about the accounts on the microblogging platform that they choose to engage with.

Using the new metric, users may decide not to follow those who post too many tweets each day and flood their feed, or those who hardly tweet on the platform.

Previous studies have shown that only a small fraction of Twitter users are responsible for most of the content on the platform on a day-to-day basis.

this new twitter feature where they tell you how many tweets you do per month is actually extremely rude imo pic.twitter.com/tNFIAuwinz

— i, too, overflow (@iwishiwasafinch) August 1, 2022

Research from the Pew Research Center in 2019 suggested that about a tenth of the users on the microblogging site created over four-fifths of all tweets.

“The median user tweets just twice each month, but a small cohort of extremely active Twitter users posts with much greater regularity,” the report said.

Sizing Up Twitter Users: U.S. adult Twitter users are younger and more likely to be Democrats than the general public. Most users rarely tweet, but the most prolific 10% create 80% of tweets from adult U.S. users #TwitterDown https://t.co/srLGVvUTw2 pic.twitter.com/P6Zbv5t8Jf

— Pew Research Internet (@pewinternet) July 11, 2019

“As a result, much of the content posted by Americans on Twitter reflects a small number of authors. The 10 per cent of users who are most active in terms of tweeting are responsible for 80 per cent of all tweets created by US users,” it noted.

Twitter said in its earnings report that its average monetisable daily active usage (mDAU) was 237.8 million in the second quarter of 2022, up 16.6 per cent compared to the same quarter of the previous year.

Some users who have gained access to the feature find it to be “brutal” and “rude”.