PR Tuesday: Why “favourite” a Tweet?

First: let me thank you for your patience. I know I had promised to post on a weekly basis, but life intervened. It’s been a busy time at work, but I’m here now and that’s what matters.

Second: as many of you know, I work in the wonderful world of PR! I decided that, you know, I have some thoughts on general trends in PR and I should share them! So I’ve decided to dedicated Tuesday posts to the very topic. I hope you at least find them somewhat insightful.

With that in mind, I had two posts in mind. I decided to go with this one and save the other idea for next week.

The majority of my readers are on Twitter; I can say that because I know that most of my traffic is derived from clicks through my personal account. One of the features of Twitter (as you know) is the ability to “favourite” a Tweet (and yes, there is a “u” in favourite – this is a Canadian blog). I think most of you would agree that there are two reasons to favourite a tweet: to show the author that you have seen and enjoyed what they said and/or to save the tweet for later.

I think marking a tweet as a favourite for the first reason is pointless. The action is a very passive form of engagement – it’s Twitter at its laziest. If you think something that somebody has said on Twitter is funny, interesting or controversial, there’s a far better solution: say so! Social media is exactly that: social. It’s an opportunity to engage, to connect with people across the globe who share similar (or not) views. I can’t count the times I’ve engaged in political debate with people across Canada who, I’ve never met and likely never will.

What do you mean?

Here’s a great example of a discussion I had with somebody today:

https://twitter.com/JTerr88/status/324260088439250944

Marking a tweet as a favourite is just as lame as clicking “like” on Facebook. What’s the purpose? A virtual thumbs up or gold star says, well, nothing. It’s something that was reinforced with me in discussion with a friend recently: a like is objectifying, in a sense. As I said: social media is social. Why be quiet and hide in the corner? Talk to people who say things you like!

Where being able to mark a tweet as a favourite comes in handy is very simple, at least for me: it’s when somebody shares something I want to view later (a link I want to visit from my own computer, after work, for example) or is something I want to follow up on (ie: someone replying to me, but not being able to reply immediately for one reason or another). In that case, a favourite serves as a bookmark.

So, what do you think? Do you agree that marking something as a “favourite” or “like” is passive? Or is it a form of meaningful engagement?