This morning Facebook rolled out “Reactions” to all users worldwide on desktop and mobile. Beginning last October, Facebook was testing hundreds of different extensions of the like button, and then they settled on the six reactions you see today. After many focus groups, and months of testing Mark Zuckerburg seems to be pleased with the results. “Love is the most popular reaction so far, which feels about right to me!”(Mark Zuckerburg). Think of these as the like button, but with more context. Now user’s can give a more detailed reaction to any post and not worry about “liking” a post about your friend getting a bad score on a test, or being worried that simply liking that status that your roommate got engaged wasn’t enough.
To use the feature on desktop, hover over the “like” button on any post. When hovering, six emoji will pop up and be animated. Available emoji are Like, Love, Haha, Sad, Angry, and Wow. On mobile, long press the like button and the same options will hover and animate themselves.
It will be very interesting to see how these can be used in a business sense. Now, rather than looking at raw engagement numbers, we can see sentiment towards each post. (Not yet really, but I can only imaging they will report these numbers soon to pages.) Suddenly it will be much more evident seeing if your following isn’t liking your direction of post. We for sure will love experimenting with this new feature as it matures, and we hope to see you too!