The 25 Meanings behind Favoriting on Twitter

I found an interesting paper describing the 25 possible motivations for clicking the “Favorite” button on someone’s tweet:

More than Liking and Bookmarking? Towards Understanding Twitter Favouriting Behaviour

The team that came up with the fav button probably did not anticipate all of these uses. I’m guessing they probably thought of 3 or 4 at most. This is interesting because it stresses the importance of studying user behavior and motivation. Changes to the behavior of the fav button will affect many of these motivations in unpredictable ways.

I wonder if Facebook’s “Like” button has similar connotations. I’d like to see a study comparing similar functionality across multiple social media sites.

I found this paper when reading this post on Medium, which is interesting in itself:

What’s Wrong with Twitter’s Latest Experiment with Broadcasting Favorites: It Steps over Social Signals While Looking for Technical Solutions