It’s about time, Twitter! The social media platform popular with celebrities and media just made the site a little more user-friendly by removing the “favorites” function and replacing the star button with a heart for “like.” Aww, how lovely!
Introduced in 2006, the favorites function acted as a bookmarking feature if you wanted to save a tweet.
Favorites were very similar to the “like” function on Facebook, where you could indicate that you liked the tweet by pressing the star. However, as Twitter mentions on their blog, not every single tweet was necessarily a favorite:
We are changing our star icon for favorites to a heart and we’ll be calling them likes. We want to make Twitter easier and more rewarding to use, and we know that at times the star could be confusing, especially to newcomers. You might like a lot of things, but not everything can be your favorite.
The heart, in contrast, is a universal symbol that resonates across languages, cultures, and time zones. The heart is more expressive, enabling you to convey a range of emotions and easily connect with people. And in our tests, we found that people loved it.
As a microblogging platform, Twitter allows its users to send out short, 140 character messages in the form of tweets. You can attach photos or videos along with the message, making it a great way to send a message to a large group of followers. The real benefit of Twitter as a social media marketing tool is its ability to disseminate information in real-time. After all, it was the hashtag that originated on this platform years ago, allowing users to find information aggregated around specific topics.
Interested in learning more about Twitter as a social media marketing tool for your business? Give us a call at (818) 488-1543 or email us today for information on EDK’s social media marketing services. Oh, and be sure to follow us on Twitter too!