I hated favorites at first.

Hated ’em.

To me, they were a copout. Before favorites if someone “liked” my tweet, they had one option: a retweet. And a retweet was awesome for me because it gave me extra reach. A favorite did nothing. I vividly remember mentally chewing on my frustration over this fact during a shuttle ride home from Snowcial one year.

But times have changed, and so did I.

Visibility
To get to the heart of why my perspective changed, we have to look at visible various tweet interactions are. Because if you retweet something, it goes into your feed. Everyone sees it. Because everyone sees it you have a finite limit before you reach the point of “too much.”

Favorites, on the other hand, are visible only to the person who posted the tweet. In other words, as long as you aren’t favoriting the same person’s stuff every time, the amount of things you can favorite is *virtually unlimited.
*technically, there is a 1,000 daily limit per account.

In other words, the building blocks for these micro-relationships are an inexhaustable resource. Not bad, eh?

Digging Deeper
And remember, just like a retweet, they don’t have to be your followers in order to interact with them.

Let me put it this way. If you look at the 10 most active resorts and 10 least active resorts in terms of favoriting, you’ll find that the average follower growth for the active group is 660% higher thank the resorts that do the least amount of favoriting.

And why? Well, partly because they also tend to be more active on Twitter in general, but also because a favorite gets someone’s attention. It the first step in these little relationships. And once you have their attention, your profile can do the rest.

Not Just Twitter
But it’s not just Twitter. Liking posts, pages, comments, pins, photos, you name it across Facebook, Pinterest, Google+, Instagram are virtually all these unlimited, one-on-one interactions that get the ball rolling and are only visible to the person you’re interacting with.

So give it a try. Try being a little more generous with favorites when it comes to you followers and non-followers alike.

The results might surprise you.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.