During the 8th annual Open Mobile Summit, Twitter’s Senior Vice President of Product Kevin Weil told the event moderator, Casey Newton, that with the change from favorites to likes, the company saw an increase of 6 percent in “like” activity within the first week of implementation.
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Many users tweeted their displeasure following the Twitter changeover to hearts instead of stars but now official Twitter data has revealed that they are in a minority.
The heart symbol is easy to recognize and makes Twitter more accessible to people.
Originally a star icon, Twitter’s “favorite” function was replaced replaced by heart last week along with a terminology shift from “favorite” to “like”. Twitter has hundreds of millions of monthly active users, and moving this up by 6% is huge, the executive said.
The heart symbol has more positive “love” connotations than a star, meaning peop, le might be less likely to “love” a serious news story about a tragic event- for example.
So while a vocal group of power users are not fond of Twitter’s new hearts system, the change has been positive for the social network.
“The heart is a very universal symbol it’s a much more inclusive symbol”. Makes sense. How many favorites could you really have at the end of the day? On launch, Twitter said the hearts would appeal to new users.
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“People just understand [Like] better”, says Weil.
