If You Really Like My Tweet, Please Don’t “Like” It
Oh, that Twitter heart button. Oh what confusion it has caused.
Back in the day, when Twitter was original and not in a mad scramble to beat-out or keep up with other social media platforms, it had a Favorite button.
It was a star icon, not a heart, and its purpose was as equally ambivalent as Twitter’s heart button now is:
- Was it a bookmark tool?
- Was it a way to communicate your approval back to its creator?
- Something else altogether?
Since there wasn’t ever a clear definition, people tended to use it in a manner that best suited them.
What a Difference an Icon Makes
And then in November 2015, Twitter changed the star to a heart and made matters worse. Why does it matter, you ask? It’s all about interpretation.
In its social media arms race, Twitter struggles to engage users. Disengaged users means less platform use, which means flat growth and sales challenges. Twitter saw the popularity of the Facebook thumbs-up Like button, and decided that since Favorites wasn’t getting enough play, they would convert it into something more comparable.
The problem with creating a button that is supposed to mimic a Facebook Like but doesn’t is that in addition to the existing ambiguity, the Twitter heart has become the defacto way people — many of whom are new to Twitter or who never understood the platform well to begin with — respond to a tweet.
Just like a Facebook Like button, all you have to do is press the heart and move on, right? Well, not really.
I think the thing that most people pressing the Twitter heart button don’t realize is that unlike the Facebook Like,
your Twitter Like doesn’t get shared with the rest of your network.
That’s because we do not see our Followers Likes in our stream. The only kind of Like we get to see in our stream is the one someone makes on one of our tweets, not on everyone’s Likes. In fact, the only way you can really see the overall Likes that someone makes is by going to their profile and looking on their Likes tab:
Why does this matter? We’re now back to the matter of purpose: Did you Like a tweet because you wanted to simply tell its creator that you liked it, or did you Like it because you meant to share it with others? Because if you meant to do the latter, you’re now the unwitting victim of a #TwitterFail.
The only way to achieve that kind of sharing (or “amplification,” as those in the biz call it) is to RETWEET the tweet (that’s the icon with two arrows in the form of a rectangle for those of you reading who’ve always been wondering what the purpose of that button is).
And if Twitter’s whole point in converting from “Favorites” to “Likes” was to help make the platform more social, it has actually had the opposite effect. Likes have zero amplification value, and worse still, in certain third party tools, the person whose tweet is Liked can’t even reply back to the person who Liked their tweet. In that instance, woe is me if I seek clarification of someone’s Like or want to start a conversation with them, or simply want to thank them for Liking my tweet.
And so I encourage you all, Fair Tweeps: If you like someone’s tweet and want to enable others to see it to, EMPLOY YOUR RETWEET BUTTON!! You will be eliminating ambiguity and helping to build community that Twitter still struggles to do.
Hollis Thomases is a former digital marketer and author of “Twitter Marketing: An Hour a Day.” She still avidly uses Twitter, preferring conversations over Likes, Retweets, and click bait.
