Is 50 likes a lot? (I can't believe I'm asking this question)
October 29, 2019 5:00 AM   Subscribe

So, I made a throw-away Twitter lurker account, but of course I couldn't help myself and started replying to tweets by blue check accounts from time to time -- mostly political stuff. Every so often I get upwards of 50 likes on a reply. Is this a lot, comparatively? Asking because I'll take any validation I can get at this point in my life!
posted by schwinggg! to Media & Arts (12 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Depends on who you are following and whether they have a few thousand followers or a few million.
posted by jacquilynne at 5:05 AM on October 29, 2019 [2 favorites]


It’s more than I get, so yes, comparatively it’s a lot. Keep at it!
posted by oceanjesse at 5:31 AM on October 29, 2019 [8 favorites]


What jacquilynne said is correct, but the other metric to look for is whether you're gaining followers. If after your 50 likes you're scooping up followers, that means they are into you. If not, that doesn't mean they aren't, but it's more about the person you're Tweeting to.
posted by warriorqueen at 5:52 AM on October 29, 2019 [5 favorites]


There's degrees of "a lot," too.

Fifty likes is "huh, that went over really well, I'm proud of that," but it won't change your experience of the site.

Higher numbers do change things, at least temporarily. A few hundred retweets means you're interacting, at least for a few days, with people you never expected to — for better and for worse. Getting retweeted by A Famous Personality means you've come to the attention of a specific community with its own ethos — again, for better and for worse. Having something blow up into the thousands means you probably can't respond to every reply even if you want to. Bigger numbers get you more new followers, who might stick around and interact in interesting ways, or who might end up being disappointed in your normal schtick.

Each of those experiences is cool in some ways and frustrating in others.

But yeah, unless you have a ton of followers yourself, or are stepping into the mentions of people who do, fifty is a substantial number.
posted by nebulawindphone at 6:12 AM on October 29, 2019 [5 favorites]


agree that it is a substantial amount compared to most posts. it's like if you did well at the craps table and now maybe the casino is sending someone out on the floor to congratulate you.

however, I urge you to reconsider your use of Twitter. if this is your relationship with the site now, you're on the path to some pretty weird places. it really can have a negative effect on people's brains.
posted by vogon_poet at 6:35 AM on October 29, 2019 [9 favorites]


Also, not to burst your bubble, but those tweets could be automated or bots.
posted by falsedmitri at 6:46 AM on October 29, 2019 [4 favorites]


You need to think of this in waves/tiers and each one below the first will get a lesser percentage.

Tweet 1 (top tweet) gets 1,000 likes
Tweet 2 (reply) will get a percentage, it's usually less than a tenth
Tweet 3 (reply to reply) will get a percentage of tweet 2

And so on. The higher the first tweet because then more people will see it... the more following ones are likely (but not guaranteed) to get. Being first always helps because people don't scroll super far.

Listen, I get that it's a dopamine hit to see those little hearts grow, but that is what they're designed for. It's deliberately made to feed into people's need for validation. Chasing it will not go well. I speak from experience. I wish Metafilter would get rid of likes desperately.

I just looked at my twitter which I mostly have open for work cause I do marketing ads sometimes, but I made a tweet in September as a reply that got 416 likes and 42.9k impressions (which means someone saw it, scrolling past it counts). So the impressions to likes is pretty skewed, most people don't like a lot of tweets beyond the main one.
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 7:09 AM on October 29, 2019 [3 favorites]


This is a lot like getting upvotes on a comment on Reddit: it has very little to do with the objective quality of your comment, and everything to do with the size of the readership of the subreddit, and how high up your comment is. If it's a big sub and you replied to the top comment, you're going to get a lot of eyeballs. I've spent hours of my life writing informative comments in tiny subs which might get a couple of upvotes if someone other than the original poster ever sees them. I've also made throwaway remarks in big subs which have racked up hundreds of upvotes. I find it amusing when some random joke blows up like that, but I know that it's just the exchange rate at work, and that's not why I write most of my comments.

I don't want to be a downer, but bear in mind that wading into high-profile conversations is a double-edged sword: it exposes you to both positive and negative attention. Twitter has no borders or communities -- it's a single public feed (with only one nuclear opt-out option of making your account private). There are various mechanisms through which a conversation you thought was limited in scope can very abruptly become very visible. Be careful out there!
posted by confluency at 7:36 AM on October 29, 2019 [1 favorite]


(I'm not suggesting that you shouldn't talk to strangers on Twitter ever; I only mention this because you specifically say that most of these conversations are political, and that set off all the troll brigade warning bells.)
posted by confluency at 7:50 AM on October 29, 2019


It's impossible to say. I responded to a J K Rowling tweet and got a few thousand likes, but that's about 0.00001% of her 30 trillion followers. I also made a comment on someone else's twitter feed that got about ten likes and a comment from the OP saying "That's really funny!".

Comments that I make on my own account don't do anything close to that, but that's because I rarely tweet and have six followers, three of whom are bots (the other three are also bots).

My feeling is that the best way to get self-validation from social media is to leave it. You will immediately feel better about yourself.
posted by It's Never Lurgi at 9:22 AM on October 29, 2019


You might enjoy Twitter Analytics; it's free and probably already turned on for your account. It'll give you a lot more insight into tweet impressions, etc. FWIW it shows me my best tweet recently had 44,000 impressions and 76 likes. Which is huge for me.

I've been an active Twitter user for 13 years but have never made any explicit effort to build an audience, so it's all pretty organic. A usual successful tweet of mine gets about 10,000 impressions and maybe a few likes. Like confluency says the #1 factor for how many favorites you get is how many people saw the tweet in the first place. The tweets of mine that blow up almost always do because some high influence person retweeted me. For you, replying to high-profile accounts may get you more views because folks are clicking through to see replies.
posted by Nelson at 11:02 AM on October 29, 2019


Speaking from experience, Twitter "likes" are not a good source of validation, and the same goes for just about any other engagement metric a social network might provide you. The only reason Twitter shows these sorts of metrics is because they know that it helps keep users around and providing content to keep feeding the social network ouroboros, and its a poor and fickle substitute for any real human connection. The validation comment might've been in jest, but if not, I'd encourage you to maybe take a step back from twitter for a little bit to figure out what it is you really want, emotionally.
posted by Aleyn at 12:28 PM on October 29, 2019 [1 favorite]


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