Twitter slapped another social media stat on user tweets: Bookmark counts.
On Thursday, Twitter began rolling out tweet analytics that show how many times a tweet has been bookmarked(Opens in a new tab). At the time of publication, the bookmark count statistic only appears on Twitter’s iOS apps, but will soon be expanded and displayed on Twitter for Web and other platforms as well.
This is what the bottom of a tweet page looks like now. So many numbers…
Credit: Mashable screenshot
“We love bookmarks to save Tweets to revisit later,” job(Opens in a new tab) the official @TwitterSupport account. “Starting today on iOS, you will now see the total number of times a Tweet has been bookmarked in the Tweet details.
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And to be clear: the number of times a tweet has been bookmarked is displayed publicly. Users won’t be able to see who bookmarked a tweet because bookmarks are meant to be private.
“We will never show accounts that have favorited a Tweet,” Twitter added(Opens in a new tab) to his tweet statement.
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The addition of the bookmark count has already been heavily criticized on Twitter, with users finding the number unnecessary. Others have joked(Opens in a new tab) that Twitter has added so many different social media stats to individual tweets that the tweet page is now cluttered. Women in particular on the platform have been bothered to find how several times(Opens in a new tab) the photos of themselves that they shared have been bookmarked.
Tweets already displayed how many times they had been retweeted, quoted and liked. In December, shortly after the company was acquired by Elon Musk, Twitter launched number of views also for tweets. With the addition of the number of bookmarks, five different metrics are now displayed on each tweet.
Jane Manchun Wong, a developer who often finds new features added to apps before they’re officially rolled out, first said reported(Opens in a new tab) about the number of Twitter bookmarks added to tweet details last month. Her too REMARK(Opens in a new tab) a trend now that the number of bookmarks is also public.
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“Just look at pornographic tweets and it seems they have a higher bookmark/like ratio,” Wong tweeted.
For those unfamiliar with this feature, Twitter first rolled out bookmarks in 2018. Before that, many Twitter users would “like” a tweet in order 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 bookmark feature allowed users to privately create a collection of tweets that they might want to refer to later.
In January of this year, Twitter moved(Opens in a new tab) the bookmark feature on its mobile apps from a drop-down 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. Shortly after, Musk tweeted(Opens in a new tab) its intention to include the number of times a tweet has been bookmarked in the total number of likes. However, with the rollout of the bookmark count, it looks like the two metrics will remain separate.
As we all know, Musk is a big fan of social media statistics.
The billionaire reportedly called an emergency meeting with Twitter engineers on Super Bowl night after a tweet of President Joe Biden has surpassed one of his own. The next day, Twitter rolled out an algorithm change that injected Musk’s tweets to the top of all users’ feeds.
Musk also promoted Twitter as the “biggest 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 weak traffic driver compared to competitors.
