Twitter has slapped yet another social media stat on users’ tweets: Bookmark counts.
On Thursday, Twitter started to roll out analytics onto tweets that show how many times a tweet has been bookmarked(Opens in a new tab). As of publishing time, the bookmark count stat is only showing up on Twitter’s iOS apps but will soon expand and be displayed on Twitter for web and other platforms too.
This is what the bottom of a tweet page looks like now. So many numbers…
Credit: Mashable Screenshot
“We love Bookmarks for saving Tweets to revisit later,” posted(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 bookmarked on Tweet details.
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And to be clear: The number of times a tweet has been bookmarked is displayed publicly. Users will not be able to see who has bookmarked a tweet as bookmarks are intended to be private.
“We’ll never display which accounts have added a Tweet to their Bookmarks,” Twitter added(Opens in a new tab) to its tweet statement.
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The addition of bookmark counts has been highly criticized on Twitter already with users finding the number pointless. Others have quipped(Opens in a new tab) that Twitter has been adding so many different social media stats to individual tweets that the tweet page has now become cluttered. Women in particular on the platform have been disturbed to find how many times(Opens in a new tab) photos of themselves that they shared have been bookmarked.
Tweets already displayed how many times it was retweeted, quoted, and liked. In December, shortly after Elon Musk acquired the company, Twitter rolled out view counts for tweets as well. With the addition of bookmark counts, there are now five different metrics displayed on each and every tweet.
Jane Manchun Wong, a developer who often finds new features being added into apps before they officially roll out, first reported(Opens in a new tab) about Twitter’s bookmark count being added into tweet details last month. She also noticed(Opens in a new tab) a trend now that bookmark counts are public too.
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“Just looking at porn tweets and it seems they have higher bookmark-to-like ratio,” Wong tweeted.
For those unfamiliar with the feature, Twitter first rolled out bookmarks in 2018. Prior to that, many Twitter users would “like” a tweet in order to save it for later. However, being that likes are public, “liking” a tweet would often be misconstrued as an endorsement of the statement in the post. The bookmark feature enabled users to privately create a collection of tweets that they may want to refer back 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. Not long after, Musk tweeted(Opens in a new tab) his intention to include the amount of times a tweet was bookmarked in the total “likes” number. However, with the roll out of bookmark counts, it seems the two metrics will be kept separate.
As we all know, Musk is a big fan of social media stats.
The billionaire reportedly called an emergency meeting with Twitter engineers on the night of the Super Bowl after a tweet from President Joe Biden outperformed one of his. The next day, Twitter rolled out an algorithm change that injected Musk’s tweets to the top of every users’ feed.
Musk has 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 low traffic driver when compared to competitors.
