The word is out: CEO Dick Costello has announced that the social media megatron, Twitter, is experimenting with a “Like” button to compliment their service that currently tops half a billion tweets a day!
I have to break this down: That is 500 million plus tweets connecting anyone with potentially everyone, making business, pleasure, and tangible conversation extremely accessible, daily.
Where Twitter has faltered (and it is not really a stumble) is in their years old “Favorite” button that allows its users to “Favorite” an individual tweet and then save it in a memory bank that is easily accessible to the user to look back on. Costolo recently spoke at London’s Internet Advertising Bureau’s Engage conference in the U.K. and confirmed recent reports that Twitter is testing out “like” and “star” buttons to potentially replace the “Favorite” tool.
Anyone who has ever crunched KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) and other metrics numbers for social media platforms will tell you that the hardest number to increase for a Twitter campaign is the number of “Favorites.”
The reason being that Twitter is a carpe diem-like in the moment service that mainly administers short bits of news and information to followers that have an increasingly decreasing attention span; Facebook provides a timeline to allow a user to go in once a day, for instance, and check everything that’s gone on in the FB world. But Twitter has far too much information to go back and watch every tweet in a day (500 million!).
So the “Favorite” is a little used or cared about function, whereas a Facebook “Like” button is essential for telling others what you fancied and what you’re following.
If Twitter can harness a “Star” or “Like” tool that not only tracks the personal user’s love of the post, but also signs them up for the Follow then perhaps it will breathe a new and interesting twist into the way the world tweets on with a billion a day in its sights.
