Twitter Mixes Things Up

At my internship, I do a lot of work on social media. One of my tasks this past week was to compose tweets for the Envision Marketing Group's twitter account. They prefer to tweet about the latest marketing trends and news stories. I found a lot of interesting articles on AdWeek, and I really enjoyed reading some of them. I went on the site this evening, and came across this article about Twitter: Read Article Here

The article discusses how many agencies do not "heart" the new changes that have been made to Twitter. There are mixed opinions from marketers about the new heart button. Noah Mallin, who works at MEC North America, said that "I look at this as a move for Twitter to add more meaningful and emotional actions for marketers to measure content performance and to base targeting and optimization of paid media on..."  This is really interesting, because it relates to what we talk about all the time in class. Brands make themselves successful through emotions. Consumers having emotional involvement can generate a purchase decision, as well as brand loyalty.

Another marketer expressed that because the heart symbol is more similar to a "human emotion" rather than a star, people will be more likely to press it. I disagree with this. I think that consumers do not have much an emotional connection at all with what kind of button they are responding to a tweet with. People quickly scroll through their Twitter feed, and because the tweets are 140 characters or less, it is a fairly quick process to just look at it and "like it". To be honest, I think that Twitter is becoming too similar to Instagram now. I think that before, they had a unique star button, which differentiated the platform from Instagram. I'm curious as to what their logic was behind this, and if it was really for the emotional involvement.

I have my iPhone set up so that updates run automatically for each of my apps. Sometimes, I get confused when I open up an app (after it's had an update), and it looks different. I think that it hurts platforms like Twitter and Instagram to be continuously updating and changing. Users get extremely comfortable with the way the site is, and it can be an adjustment to get used to changes. However- I do think that this can generate W.O.M., because people will say things like, "have you seen the new Twitter update?". In fact, I didn't hear about the Twitter update until my roommate was talking about it last night!