What is the point of favorite-ing a tweet?

1. 79

   ForLoveofCupcakesposted 9 years ago

   What is the point of favorite-ing a tweet?
   
   A lot of people favorite my tweets instead of re-tweeting. I find myself wishing they would RT because that benefits me, exposes their readers to my handle...
   
   Does favorite-omg benefit me in any way. Why don't people RT instead, especially when I'm promoting a post from their blog?

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2. 66

   CISSPTutorposted 9 years ago

   The real answer is that they like your tweet enough to favorite but not enough to retweet them. Possibly they are seeing more than one person promoting their blog and they do not want to retweet everyone one of them and spam their followers because they all might essentially contain the same material. But they still want to show some gratitude for the fact that you had promoted their material and they do it by favoriting it.
   
   The only advantage for you is that your tweet will be in their radar and if they see enough of such tweets, they might start following you or retweet your tweets. It just reduces the friction a bit. In a way it is a foot in the door to more engagement. Retweeting is better than favoriting but favoriting is better than nothing

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      ForLoveofCupcakesposted 9 years agoin reply to this

      That makes a lot of sense; what an excellent answer! Thanks, CISSPTutor!

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3. 70

   Aime Fposted 9 years ago

   I actually RT stuff a lot more than I favourite it - I currently only have one favourite tweet and I sort of reserve it for really "special" stuff.
   
   The advantage in a favourite is that it doesn't get lost in someone's timeline. If you have someone with a decent amount of followers favourite a tweet, it's more likely to be seen by new followers or people who don't check Twitter very often.

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      ForLoveofCupcakesposted 9 years agoin reply to this

      Oh interesting. I didn't know that... Thanks Aime!

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4. 83

   anusha15posted 9 years ago

   Hey, favoriting is different from Retweet, but it's not useless.
   So someone does like your tweet and would want to express that, but either s/he are too choosy about what s/he wants to retweet, or may be your tweet is something s/he likes, but thinks that it wouldn't be relevant for their followers.
   Sometimes, people have multiple twitter accounts, because they do not want to mix their followers who are interested in extremely different things.
   So that's the point of favoriting. I like your tweet, and would save it in my favorite tweets for future reference, but either I don't like it enough to retweet, or my followers will bang my head for crowding their feed with irrelevant stuff.
   By the way, with the change in policies and execution in Twitter off late, favorites will have a lot more advantage than they did earlier. They will have more visibility in people's manipulated (by Twitter) timelines probably. So let a highlighted heart make you smile, and don't think, "Why not the circular arrows instead?"

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