This Week’s Top Stories
(Twitter Blog, 11/3/15)
PNConnect Insight – So this has…not gone over well. The common points of contention seem to be 1) “Like” signifies a different emotional investment than “Favorite” does, which is what Facebook realized as it opted to move away from Likes in favor of more nuanced engagement, and 2) The reasons people Fav’d something varied greatly and “Like” doesn’t fit those needs. In addition to the ever-popular “hate fav,” many favorites were used to bookmark a story, signal acceptance of the message without needing to reply, and so on. Twitter is obviously hoping “Like” resonates more with the casual user, but the power users that are doing much of the heavy lifting on Twitter have defined usage patterns, and this is a case of Twitter not being hip to those as it scrambles to please investors. The increased attention of “like” may cause a spike in its usage, but it will be a while before we know whether behavior has really changed.

Read the rest of the stories on the PNConnect blog.