Twitter Favors Facebook's 'Likes' Over 'Favorites'

"Twitter Favors Facebook's 'Likes' Over 'Favorites'"

Amanda Esquivel

Published: November 3, 2015

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/11/03/twitter-likes-hearts-more-than-stars/?mod=ST1

     Twitter made an interesting change this week. The famous social media platform now offers an option to "like" a tweet rather than "favorite" it. Since Facebook became popular, the "like" option has also -- maybe even more so than Facebook itself. The new feature also switched out the star symbol associated with "favorite" button for a heart, which is also very commonly used among many other social media sites. A heart is a universal symbol, and Twitter found that its users love it. The new change came about as a way to make Twitter less confusing and more user-friendly. Although this is not the big update many users have been expecting -- extending the 140 character tweet limit -- it has still received much attention. 

     This article relates to our marketing class because in the chapter focusing on product, we discussed that any change to a product makes it new, so Twitter's minor update constitutes it as a new product. I chose this article because I am an avid Twitter user, and the change was a little odd to me because I have become so accustomed to "favoriting" tweets. Although when applied to life, I suppose I can like many things, while everything cannot be my favorite. While Twitter claims that users love "likes" and hearts, many tweets that I came across were not in favor of the update. Maybe everyone will grow to "like" it.