Why it makes sense for Twitter to differentiate between liking and saving tweets

Before the ❤️ button, Twitter had a ⭐️ button.

In the Twitter vocabulary the star was intended to mean Favorite. But, in November 2015 Twitter changed the star to a heart because, in their words:

We are changing our star icon for favorites to a heart and we’ll be calling them likes. We want to make Twitter easier and more rewarding to use, and we know that at times the star could be confusing, especially to newcomers. You might like a lot of things, but not everything can be your favorite. - Akarshan Kumar, Product Manager at Twitter

When Twitter launched, having separate actions of saving and liking would have been overkill. It certainly would have been confusing for users.

But now that more and more long form content is being shared and discovered on Twitter, the idea of distinct actions for a public endorsement of a tweet and a save or bookmark feature makes sense.

In fact, we’ve seen other platforms introduce their own save or bookmark features recently.

In early December, Instagram introduced the idea of Saved Posts.

Each Instagram photo now has a little Bookmark icon at the bottom right. And users now have a spot where they can see all their Saved Posts, which are only visible to the user.

I find this extremely useful. Sometimes I see things on Instagram that I actually want to refer back to — a recipe, an interior design idea, a travel spot — Saved Posts allows me to have a special spot to put these things. Otherwise they get lost in a sea of things that I’ve given a heart to.

Prior to Saved Posts on Instagram, I would take screenshots of things I wanted to remember. But of course, then the screenshots get lost in a sea of photos on my Camera Roll.

Facebook added a Save feature back in 2014. Users can save posts, links, and places.

What’s helpful about Facebook’s Save feature is that it reminds you about things you saved.

This is a really useful feature because it’s easy to forget to go and check back on the things you saved. But the reminder increases the chances that I actually go and engage with and consume whatever it was that I saved.

Medium also has a bookmark feature to let users save articles to read later.

Again, very helpful for all the reasons that I just gave for saving things on Facebook and Instagram. But, I do wish Medium would email me once a week or something to remind me about things I’ve bookmarked.

The save for later feature is becoming a familiar user behavior as more and more mainstream platforms introduce it. Therefore, if Twitter were to introduce it, there would be little to no learning curve for users.