Twitter has slapped another social media statistic on user tweets: bookmark counts.
On Thursday, Twitter began implementing tweet analytics that show how many times a tweet has been posted. marked(Opens in a new tab). At the time of publication, the bookmark count statistic is only displayed on Twitter’s iOS apps, but it will soon be expanded and displayed on Twitter for the web and other platforms as well.
This is what the bottom of a tweet page now looks like. so many numbers…
Credit: Mashable Screenshot
“We love Bookmarks for saving Tweets to revisit later.” aware(Opens in a new tab) the official @TwitterSupport account. “Starting today on iOS, you’ll now see the total number of times a Tweet has been favorited in the Tweet details.
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And to be clear: the number of times a tweet has been flagged is displayed publicly. Users will not be able to see who has favorited a tweet, as bookmarks are meant to be private.
“We will never show which accounts have added a Tweet to their Favorites”, Twitter aggregate(Opens in a new tab) to your tweet statement.
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The addition of marker counts has already been heavily criticized on Twitter with users finding the number meaningless. others have joked(Opens in a new tab) that Twitter has been adding so many different social media statistics to individual tweets that the tweet page has now become cluttered. Women in particular on the platform have been disturbed to discover how many times(Opens in a new tab) the photos of themselves they shared have been flagged.
Tweets already showed how many times they were retweeted, quoted, and liked. In December, shortly after the company was acquired by Elon Musk, Twitter launched see counts for tweets too. With the addition of bookmark counts, five different metrics are now displayed on each and every tweet.
Jane Manchun Wong, a developer who often discovers new features being added to apps before they’re officially released, first reported(Opens in a new tab) about the Twitter bookmark count that was added to the tweet details last month. She too noticed(Opens in a new tab) a trend now that marker counts are also public.
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“I only look at the porn tweets and they seem to have a higher ratio of bookmarks to likes,” Wong tweeted.
For those unfamiliar with the feature, Twitter first launched bookmarks on 2018. Before then, many Twitter users liked a tweet to save it for later. However, since likes are public, liking a tweet would often be misinterpreted as an endorsement of the statement in the post. The bookmarking feature allowed users to privately create a collection of tweets that they might want to refer back to later.
In January of this year, Twitter moved(Opens in a new tab) the bookmark feature in your mobile apps from a dropdown menu to a tappable icon visible on the same page as each tweet. The goal was to promote the use of the feature on the platform. Not long after, Musk tweeted(Opens in a new tab) its intent to include the number of times a tweet was flagged in the total number of likes. However, with the implementation of marker counts, it appears that the two metrics will remain separate.
As we all know, Musk is a big fan of social media analytics.
The billionaire reportedly called an emergency meeting with Twitter engineers on the night of the Super Bowl. after a tweet of President Joe Biden surpassed one of his own. The next day, Twitter implemented an algorithm change that injected Musk’s tweets to the top of everyone’s feed.
Musk has also promoted Twitter as the “larger click driver(Opens in a new tab) on the Internet” and later deleted the tweet when fact checks pointed out that the social network is actually a fairly low traffic driver compared to competitors.
