Twitter says new users engage with likes at a 9% higher rate than they did with favorites; overall, engagement is 6% higher with likes than favorites
Alex Kantrowitz / BuzzFeed :
Context & Ripple Effects
Earlier in 2015, a Pew report flagged the exact problem this rename targets: Twitter was adding users without adding engagement, while Facebook's smaller growth came with deeper usage. Rebranding 'favorites' as 'likes' is Twitter testing whether the vocabulary itself — borrowed from the platform users already engage with most — moves its own numbers.
The data Twitter released here (new users engaging 9% more, everyone else 6% more) became a template for how the company iterates: measure a small design change, publish the lift, ship it. The same playbook shows up later in ranked conversations on mobile and in the read-before-you-retweet prompt, which Twitter also justified with engagement-side metrics.
First-order effects
- Twitter gets a measurable engagement lift from the rename itself — 9% among new users, 6% overall — directly addressing the user-growth-without-engagement gap Pew identified earlier that year.
- New users now learn an interaction model ('likes') consistent with other major networks, lowering the onboarding friction that favorites' idiosyncratic star icon created.
Second-order effects
- Stronger per-user engagement gives Twitter a better story against Facebook for advertiser budgets, in a contest where Twitter has been closing the publisher-traffic gap (cutting into Facebook's lead on referrals to publishers by early 2018).
- Rival networks face pressure to keep their own engagement affordances competitive, since Twitter just demonstrated that even cosmetic interaction changes produce measurable behavior shifts.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, platform design converges on shared interaction vocabulary (likes, retweets with friction prompts, ranked replies), making cross-network switching cheaper for users but concentrating engagement-engineering expertise in a few large platforms whose internal metrics decide what billions see.
The trend: Social platforms are treating micro-interaction design — naming, ranking, friction — as a measurable lever on engagement, shipping small changes validated by published internal metrics rather than overhauls.