Twit­ter is renowned for allow­ing its users to cre­ate and define some of its fea­tures (i.e. @replies, #hash­tags, retweets). The Favorites fea­ture is one of the older ones on Twit­ter, but it doesn’t get a lot of pub­lic­ity. To see your favorites go to http://twitter.com/favorites and to see other users’ favorites go to http://twitter.com/username/favorites. You’ll see not a lot of peo­ple use them because they are usu­ally unsure how to use them. Today, I wanted to quickly talk about the three ways I use Favorites on Twitter:

  1. Social Book­mark­ing
  2. Self Pro­mo­tion
  3. Awe­some Tweets

Social Book­mark­ing

Peo­ple love Twit­ter because of its great con­tent. Most of the peo­ple I fol­low have some­thing to offer me like the lat­est news, great design posts, and other wacky stuff I would have never heard about if it weren’t for Twit­ter. I don’t always have time to read every arti­cle or the patience to load every web page over EDGE so when I’m on the go I favorite tweets that look inter­est­ing to check out later.

Some­times if they are rel­e­vant to Twit­ter I’ll leave them in my favorites. If it’s some­thing I’d like to share fur­ther, I’ll either retweet it, or share if on deli­cious and it’ll get tweeted out from Friend­Feed. (note: most of my newest favorites are usu­ally ones I haven’t decided to keep)

Using your favorites as a social book­mark­ing tool allows oth­ers to see what you find valu­able while at the same time shar­ing inter­est­ing content.

Self Pro­mo­tion

The best way to val­i­date your­self as a worth­while mem­ber of the Twit­ter com­mu­nity is to be acknowl­edged by your peers. Sites like MrTweet allow oth­ers to rec­om­mend you, but it’s just as quick to favorite a tweet from some­one who is thank­ing you for your help or com­pli­ment­ing your lat­est blog post or design. This is one of my favorite tweets that came from a for­mer student:

Favorite Tweets That Promote You

Favorite Tweets That Pro­mote You

Awe­some Tweets

Some­times you come across tweets you never want to for­get. Some­times it’s a mean­ing­ful quote and other times it’s just some­thing funny. While it may be tempt­ing, don’t favorite a bunch of fake celebrity tweets no mat­ter how funny they are. A bet­ter exam­ple of an awe­some tweet to favorite is this one from Daiv Rus­sell:

Moti­va­tion: Ppl are “social” ani­mals. We want to help those who are good to us. To get, give: inter­est, attn, time, love.
May 21, 2009 8:42 AM via webReplyRetweetFavorite
@DaivRawks
Daiv Rus­sell

It’s my opin­ion that you should try to keep your favorites under con­trol. They lose their use­ful­ness when you have too many. If you notice you are using your favorites for social book­mark­ing too much, con­sider get­ting a deli­cious account. If you can’t find any tweets to favorite that pro­mote you as a worth­while Twit­ter user, get more involved in the con­ver­sa­tion. If your friends’ tweets seem mun­dane, check out sites like MrTweet to get rec­om­men­da­tions on new peo­ple to fol­low that might be more interesting.

How do you use your favorites on Twit­ter? You can now leave com­ments using your Twit­ter account. Try it out!