In a panel held at Buzzfeed’s headquarters, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams shared his view about how the follower count might not be all that important after all. As the social network sees more accounts attempt to buy their Twitter influence, Williams says that it’s possible the social network service might move away from measuring how many followers a user has and replacing it with metrics based on how many views a tweet receives. “The thing I think would be more interesting than followers is… retweets,” says Williams. The Twitter board member went on to say that follower counts “don’t capture your distribution. Not only would an emphasis on how many times a tweet’s been read provide greater accuracy for influence outreach, but it would also stifle all the high percentage of spam accounts that Twitter sees.
