Speaking to a crowd at BuzzFeed's kitten photo factory in New York earlier this week, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams suggested that the almighty follower counter might not be the best way to measure a user's actual audience. The metric, which only seems to interest people who list "Social Media strategist" in their bio, is kind of a joke given how many fake Twitter accounts are supposedly out there.

To Williams, who still remains on Twitter's board now that he's moved on to Obvious Corp, the ideal metric would be the number of people who actually saw a tweet. A retweet from a big shot Twitterer should carry more weight than a hollow tweet to spam accounts, after all. It's the same idea behind Klout — another San Francisco startup that measures how users influence others on various social media. After Twitter made some changes to how third party apps use their system last month (and whipping up some backlash in the process), the company has started collecting more detailed data on user engagement.

Of course, an engagement metric also gives Twitter a little more leverage with data-hungry advertisers who are still trying to figure out how to measure what they're getting when when they pay for Kim Kardashian's next #sponsoredtweet. The preferred platform for organizing protests and sharing photos of one's lunch still has to make a buck at some point.

Still, we wouldn't expect them to dump the follower count right away — that would only get those power users with high follower counts riled up.

[BuzzFeed]
[VentureBeat]