Twitter Sees 6% Increase in “Like” Activity After First Week of Hearts
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
We aren't comparing apples to apples. It is a different button with different meaning.
The barrier to my "liking" something is substantially lower than my "favoriting" it. I understand both, but I'll do more of one than another.
The real question is what the goal is and whether user are getting more value from more likes versus fewer favorites.
Are my interactions 6% more engaging? Does the quantity of interactions cover the decrease in quality of meaning?
Subjectively, I don't feel like it. Favorites had more meaning to me than Facebook likes precisely because there was a higher bar. They've diluted the meaning of a term and are, unsurprisingly, seeing people use it more often.
"Like" versus "Favorite" is a much smaller change, of course, as is "heart" versus "star" -- but they're still changes. Why shouldn't they have an effect?
Over time, social media platforms have effectively converged on the same basic set of verbs, with each verb doing everything all its parents did. But people still think of the verb as being the same one the platform started with, and limit their use to that use-case. I think it can be smart to switch from a "dialect" verb signifies to a "common loan-word" one, precisely to get people to take notice that the verb really has done more than they thought for a while now.
It's trickier with Facebook, and it might be the same with Twitter if I used it for personal interactions, because on Facebook I see a lot of "my family member died" and 'like' is not entirely appropriate for that.
The side effect of this behavior was that it sent a signal to the community that "Marc Andreessen" "Favorited" this page/product/tweet which could have surprising effect. I was at a receiving end of this and it brought a hoard of viewership/followers/favorites.
But until I read the rest of your post, I wasn't sure which one you'd be using more.
But if Twitter have any sense, they'll do a lot more to encourage the feeling that a tweet has accomplished something, been seen by people, achieved something in the world.
Instagram is killing twitter when it comes to short-form public social profiles. Depending on the hash tags, you will get likes instantly for your photos. The narcissism and instant gratification can be very addicting.
With twitter, you either need a re-tweet, or a "favorite," which clearly doesn't work well because no one wants to "bookmark" tweets.
To me this looks like an attempt to grab some of the "slacktivism" clicking that Instagram and Facebook provide by copying the metaphor with the lower barrier to entry.
To the newest kids on the block (in the literal sense), Twitter could position itself as "Instagram for Text." If that makes any sense, and it catches traction, you could see instagram responding by allowing posts without pictures, etc.
The closer these networks get to each other with form and function, the fiercer the fight could be. Which in Twitter's case is a good thing because they've been losing.
All that does for me is increase the feeling that tweeting is near-worthless.
They need to make the time and social cost of interacting with a tweet as low as possible. Even something that's "less" than a heart. Always thought Instagram could do this by allowing liking where the identity of your like wasn't visible to anyone.
Unfortunately, I think they've tailored it for larger users and it does little to sway newcomers or even regulars with modest audiences.
What evidence supports this claim ?
I disagree on a personal level. I used "favorites" almost exclusively to bookmark tweets and I have "unliked" all of my previous favorites because the meaning has drastically changed.
that rings alarm bells of contradiction in my mind; i always use the favorite to bookmark tweets - and i notice a lot of my followers do the same. of course i want to bookmark them for reading later.
I used to star to read later. I now open the link into a browser and get to it later on. And I use the star a lot less than I would hit the heart on Instagram - and Twitter know that's a serious problem for them.
Now
People do want to bookmark tweets. But Twitter reasoned (probably correctly) that people "like" a lot more tweets than they bookmark. Naturally, Twitter likes the idea of visible engagement, so they are encouraging people to do the lighterweight thing.
What's interesting is that I had already found my own behavior changing. For years I used 'favoriting' as bookmarking...but in the last year or so, I've changed and was already using it as a show of appreciation. I wonder if many other people were doing the same thing already.
People on instagram are looking for instant gratification (nothing wrong with that), so it will always win that battle. People on twitter are looking for news, controversy, protests, etc.
That's an important function for some people. But it does not have the same mass appeal, so can only scale to a certain degree. I don't see how they can solve that problem by adjusting the functionality.
With Twitter, its tweets, follows, "favorites", and... @shouting, which is still a "tweet."
The problem with twitter is if I search for, say #occupywallstreet, I'm probably much less likely to bookmark it than I would "like" an instagram photo.
The difference ultimately lies in the fact that its about attracting investment - and twitter/(instagram/facebook) all share the same piece of that pie. So when you're posting KPIs for your business - they better look better than someone else's even though they are different "people/personalities."
The truth is all social networks are competing for the same influx of new users - those coming of age and interacting with social networks for the first time. Twitter isn't winning the minds of existing users with their hearts - they'll be looking at engagement and retention metrics for users that have joined 6 months from now, and never even knew you could once "favorite" a tweet.
I regularly use Instagram as a photo archive to look back on travels, places I've lived, things that happened last month, etc.
And the general effect from my timeline is that I keep being reminded of the health and happiness of my friends, which has nothing to do with narcissism or instant gratification, really.
People use Twitter, on the other hand, to convey ideas, often highly academic or controversial -- doesn't have the same mass appeal.
I agree; the goal should be indeed improving the net positive contributions to people’s lives. I was happy to find out that there is some work directed at designing products for human values; see Tristan Harris's project, "Time Well Spent":
I don't think that makes sense for twitter though, because "popular tweets" are not really substantial for the platform - and I actually like that about twitter. It's not so much a popularity contest as platforms are.
So, without the need for a strong ranking, I'm not sure if more likes are actually a good outcome. What do we gain from this, other than making it harder to find your (truly) favorite tweets again?
But I don't think being in the news has anything to do with it. Nobody who wasn't using Twitter before suddenly heard the announcement and went "Hearts? Finally! I fucking hate stars!"
Twitter's a global media platform, so it's hard to tell when the tail is wagging the dog. Unfortunately, the article doesn't explain that it's a 6% increase in this specific activity relative to all the other activity they track.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I agree with tyre's assessment. "Liking" something is substantively different from "favoriting," at least for those of us who overthink its application or feel that marking something as a favorite has connotations beyond simply giving a nod to the person who posted. What this means is anyone's guess or even if it's going to matter in the long run.
Insignificant observation? Likely! But it's one more data point that agrees with a few others here.
But I will get over that, because Twitter is a very useful medium. This has nothing to with the success of Twitter as a business.
What I am interested in, is whether this is detectable from background noise of people using Twitter more because it is in the news. That is not the sort of thing that a TechCrunch puff piece is going to care about, and/or Twitter may have good reasons for not bothering to share the data. But I would like to know!
Probably not, or at least I'm sure there's some percentage of users who were oblivious to the fact they could "favorite" something. Now they know, and now they're using it (or were reminded?). That said, I'm sure there's also a non-trivial number of users who feel as I do.
I'm sure their UX folks entertained the idea of having both (liking via hearts + bookmarking via favorites) and decided it would be too disruptive to change at this point. I can't really blame them, but I do have to wonder: Are those use cases substantially different enough to warrant having both, or is the advantage of having a single "like" feature (fairly well understood, even across platforms--think Facebook) a more overriding concern with greater utility while maintaining simplicity?
It definitely sucks for people who were using favorites for what they were (or thought they were) intended only to have it changed up.
I can't quite make sense of https://twitter.com/mjg59/status/661781723038912512 but it's quite clearly related to the (soviet-)star->heart transition over at twitter.
I think his analysis is spot on, you're just the outlier ;)
Yes, because the interaction is the same (both in consumer interaction and reward): you're clicking a button. The favorites button, through its monument, made people less likely to engage with posts they enjoy.
As a blogger, Twitter favorites/likes are, and always have been, meaningless. Facebook likes, on the other hand, do have actual value.
1. They contribute to a web page's share count that you see next to the social media buttons
2. They are factored into the Facebook algorithm, and make a post more likely to be shown
3. If I like something, FB will show it to some of my friends as if it were a share
One very simple thing Twitter could do is implement #1 and #3. If that did that alone, I would immediately allocate Twitter a much larger share of my ad spend.
It's promising anyway, considering the number of people who were internet-outraged at the time.
Most probably it's more just simply the news media effect. And yes you are right, it's going to be more interesting if this stays up.
I often thought "This is a good tweet... but why should I favorite something on Twitter?!"
Copy/paste the url into another tab, then bookmark it? Favoriting tweets for later review is a substantially more convenient workflow.
So, you favorite it, read the article later and then unfavorite? If you don't unfavorite, how do you differentiate between a bunch of links int he past week that you may/may not have read?
If I want to read something later, I add it to my "Read It Later" service of choice: Pocket.
Dedicated read-it-later services just end up being a list of articles I haven't read and feel bad about.
It used to be for me, too. Now I'm much more loose about marking something as read without reading it.
The engagement ratio of Instagram to Twitter is several orders of magnitude off.
You look are Redbull on both platforms. Twitter they have average of 40 retweets and 150 likes/faves, plus some replies. Instagram they have 50-80k likes and 100 to 1k comments.
Even if twitter had 1000% increase that would not help the platform where there is so little active engagement.
Either way, how do you propose Twitter gets to Instagram volumes other than through lots of incremental changes? Instagram didn't get where it is today in one fell swoop.
Not all the way, but a team of 13 did pretty darn well in just two years--enough that it then caused Facebook to make an offer
Ultimately, six percent is a significant movement and it's certainly not a bad thing for the company.
"Engagement" seems to be one of those alternative metrics that companies point to when they're not making actual money.
That use is called engagement. It's not a marketing term, it's a product term that's used in marketing.
* 6% increase compared to the same time last year?
* 6% increase in WoW favorite/like activity?
* 6% increase in the probability that a given user will favorite/tweet a given tweet?
Granted, in all cases, 6% is a lot at Twitter's scale, although depending on the metric used, it may not be proof that the change is unequivocally better.
In my opinion the main (not only) reason it feels familiar to people is because of Facebook. Since when was it easier to understand the use of symbol for 'love' towards 140 characters of text than use the symbol for 'favourite'?
DON'T CHANGE THAT CHANNEL!!
I see nothing in this article other than two overly-verbose paragraphs summarizing a couple of tweets.
"Like" is much narrower. It's also at odds with its own symbol, ️<3 (goddamnit HN please stop stripping emoji), which means "love", a more intense emotion with different connotations.
If they can get more people to "engage" by clicking a heart instead of a star, it's more revenue for them, even if it doesn't improve user experience at all.
Of course, there's a good chance the market for Twitter ads will correct, and value an engagement lower if the new engagements don't lead to sales or click-throughs or whatever metric.
I think of 'favouriting' something as a kind of bookmark that I might want to go back to some time. I know that's now how you use twitter, but this definitely coloured my opinion.
People seem to have a personal/emotional attachment to the heart symbol, which makes it suitable for social networks like Instagram, because you can love a picture! But a Donald Trump status? Not so much.
Anecdotally I used to get more engagement on my tweets via the cross-post on Facebook than I did on Twitter. The kicker -- I was working at Twitter and the people liking them on Facebook but not faving them on Twitter also worked at Twitter (!)
or people just a new icon and wanted to see what it did.