You picked the most extreme example of any account. I'd bet Elon gets a lot of hate-follows. They won't like his tweets. You can see many real people replying to his tweets, so you can tell he gets plenty of engagement.
For others without much engagement (retweets/replies), like Cory, all we have to go off of is likes, views, followers. I don't disagree that we can come up with a more accurate formula.
I'm pretty sure you could pick literally any account and get similar numbers. The point is that Cory isn't an outlier or unpopular or anything. All twitter users are like this.
> I'm pretty sure you could pick literally any account...
> All twitter users are like this.
That's the point. Cory isn't like all users. He has 480k followers.
The reality is very few of his followers engage with the tweets. He previously had engagement, he no longer has that engagement, and thinks Twitter is dying. It didn't help that he told his followers to go to mastodon.
I really think he doesn't play to the platform's strengths: succinct commentary. His whole career has been about long-form writing.
So the argument here is that if you have few followers or loads of followers then the ratio of views to likes don't matter, or 1% is fine, but if you're in the middle with 480k it's very important and shows that you're out of touch if you only get 1%?
That doesn't seem particularly reasonable. If only 1% of users at any level are really engaging with the platform then its fair to say the platform has a problem.
> So the argument here is that if you have few followers or loads of followers then the ratio of views to likes don't matter
Ratio between 0.05% - 1% shows good engagement. I rarely see it above 1%. Those are 'viral' tweets. I've never seen 2% or more.
Ratio regularly dropping below 0.05% without lots of replies/retweets is bad. A low ratio could mean high views from bots (e.g. Musk) or other non-follower sources, so replies/retweets help to indicate there is healthy engagement. Cory doesn't have that.
> if you're in the middle with 480k it's very important and shows that you're out of touch if you only get 1%?
The 480k is his _potential_ reach.
You aren't entitled to reaching all 480k of your followers. They follow other people. Their feed has limited space.
Similar to how Youtubers tell people to subscribe AND enable notifications. Doing so shortcuts the algo. You can do the same on Twitter. If the small % of followers that see your tweets don't engage, the feedback loop of getting to more of your followers never kicks off.
This is obvious with well-liked accounts. More obvious when these types of accounts are private because the like/view ratio is a higher signal (ie no fly-by views).
> If only 1% of users at any level are really engaging with the platform then its fair to say the platform has a problem.
Not a problem. It's the nature of the beast. Only a small % engage. The likes create a feedback loop that gets more views, but rarely breaks above 1% likes/views ratio. You see the same limits to conversion rates in other areas (e.g. advertising or eCommerce sales).
