“Paul Revere” on Twitter posted a mini-rant Saturday that went:
Don’t f****** favorite my tweets. Either retweet or shut the f*** up. Go back to Facebook if you don’t know what this means.
This isn’t the sort of thing that gets me exercised, but I do wonder what the purpose of a “favorite” is on the social media site. It serves as a small thumbs-up to the writer of the tweet, though it’s far smaller a vote of approval than a “re-tweet,” which puts the tweet in your personal feed, making it available to all of your followers.
Most people never see the tweets you simply “favorite,” though they are available — Paul Revere’s are here, for instance, I use the “favorite” button sparingly, sometimes as a quiet shout-out, other times to save a link-based tweet for later consideration. Generally, if I really like a tweet, a re-tweet it. If I don’t, I follow Revere’s instructuions.
The Twitterverse didn’t react well to Revere’s rant. At this writing the above tweet had 7,539 “favorites” and just 233 retweets.
When do you fave and when do you retweet?
