Twitter tells the user how many impressions their updates get. The numbers often run in thousands, even if there are few public reactions. Everyone wonders from time to time: does anybody read my tweets or do people just drop in to leave their own posts? So, last Saturday, I tweeted this as an experiment:
Quick Test: If you read this, please click the heart. Thanks for your help.
During the first days, I checked the users who read my tweet, name by name. Initially, hearts came mainly from my followers, but later the proportion of non-followers grew. As the number of hearts increased, my tweet was seen by more people who weren’t following me. The total number of non-followers’ hearts accounted for about twenty percent.
I have 14,150 followers. My test tweet, according to Twitter’s own statistics, made 15,662 impressions. However, it received only 891 heart-clicks, less than 6 percent of impressions. If I omit the impressions of non-followers caused by an exceptional amount of likes, roughly 5 percent of my followers read and actually responded to the request to click. That’s not much of an impression.