This is a follow up to my post yesterday called Twitter Really Needs a Like Button. A few people gave some great feedback on my article where I suggested that the Twitter stream is very noisy – lots of spam; lots of irrelevant gibberish; lots of noise.
And I feel that an effective way to clean up this noise (or garbage) in Twitter’s stream is to add a “Like” button – much like the Facebook Like button, but for tweets.
One comment I received was the question “when would I retweet and when would I like”?
This is a simple answer really, but so critically important in the role a “Like” button would play in tweets.
@SocialMedia_SEO just like’d “Apple’s iPad is expected to be released in April 2011” via @TabletCrunch
If you retweet something, you are wanting to share the content with all of your followers. If you “Like” something, this doesn’t necessarily mean you are intent on sharing with your followers, it’s simple a vote – or a thumbs up – on a piece on content.
Of course, this Twitter “Like” button could be programmed to redistribute the tweet your just “Like’d” – something like:
@SocialMedia_SEO just like’d “Apple’s iPad is expected to be released in April 2011” via @TabletCrunch
The tweet above actually leaves 38 character spaces left – so the concept would work perfectly. But even if the tweet that you “Like’d” is too long, the actual content of the tweet could be limited to a specific character length leaving enough room for the @’s.
It is clear on Facebook that people are more than happy to “Like” something, and this is nothing more than “vote” on a piece of content.
And just like Google’s search algorithm that determines authority and ranking on the voting system of back links, so can the “Like” function in Twitter.
Thoughts?