It is an amazing discovery when you’ve been using a site for more than a year and then come across some new, unexpectedly genius way to take advantage of it. This happened with Twitter to me: I found a new awesome way to make the most of its feature called "Favorites" (do you use it?).
It never occurred to me that knowing who favorites my Tweets and which of my Tweets get favorited, I get an opportunity to do the following:
- Find new partners and targeted contacts : if a person adds something to favorites, he is likely to be interested in the topic. If he added your Tweet to favorites, he is most likely to know you. Thus, all you need to do is (after some research) to contact him and discuss how you can partner to help each other.
- Analyze your own Tweets: by seeing which of your Tweets get favorited, you can learn more about your followers’ interests and preferences. And this means more post ideas, more targeted Tweets, etc.
Note: of course, there are more factors to come into play. For example, a Tweet on Tuesday morning is more likely to get noticed and hence added to favorites than a Tweet posted on Sunday when most of your contacts are offline. Therefore, you should also do some research before arriving at any conclusions: track some trends, learn more about your contacts, etc.
There are two awesome tools that allow you to see which of your Tweets are added to favorites by your followers (you didn’t expect me to share the tip without giving some more actionable advice, did you?).
1. FavStar
FavStar is a Digg for Twitter favorites. It tracks what gets favorited on Twitter and displays recent Tweets that get over 100, 50 or 10 stars. If you want to analyze your own Tweets, you will need to sign in and go to "Me" tab. In it, you can see your recently favorited Tweets and your most favorited Tweets:
2. Favotter
Favotter is a similar tool with the only difference that it requires no registration. The fact that it is open and public has one major disadvantage though: it is said to be limited to each user’s first 1000 followers. Anyway it can be a quick alternative to the above one (especially for those who, rightfully, don’t like giving away their Twitter account info).
The list of a user’s favorited Tweets can be filtered by the number of stars it received: 1 fav, 3 favs, 3 favs and 5 favs:
Can you think of more possible uses of this information? I would love to hear your thoughts!
