The governing idea behind Reactions is that people don’t always want “Like” to be their reaction to a post.
Advertisement
Now instead of a basic thumbs up, users can choose between Love, Wow, Angry, Sad and Haha emoticons. (Of course, one could argue that is what comments are for.) It can also, of course, provide Facebook with more nuanced data about what you actually mean when you “like” a post – valuable information for its ever-advancing algorithms.
It was late last month when Facebook announced plans to tinker with their popular Like button feature. Desktop users have to hover over the Like button to see the Reaction image options.
According to their blog, Facebook has been working on the new reaction features for over a year and have been conducting global research including focus groups and surveys to determine what types of reactions people would want the most. We’ll just have to wait and see.
But the other two – “Sad” and “Angry” – are as close to a “Dislike” button as we’re likely to see in the near future.
In terms of the impact the new Reaction buttons will have on Pages, that’s still not totally clear.
There’s no official word yet on when Reactions will be available in the iOS app, but a spokesperson for Facebook did say the social media giant is “rolling out Reactions slowly”.
Zhuo says people click on “like” more than a billion times a day, so “we didn’t want to make that any harder”.
Facebook’s algorithms now bump posts higher up in your news feed if they have a lot of “likes”.
Advertisement
The new buttons, which were first unveiled in October previous year, have been on trial in Spain and Ireland – but as of today we all get to use them. There were just too many posts where that was not appropriate at all.
