Back in March, the rumour mill spun into overdrive about at the possibility of a “dislike” button after Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said that the site wanted to give users the option to express feelings other than “liking”. The option can be quite restrictive and, therefore, the introduction of Reactions will offer more appropriate response options for posts that one really cannot like, allowing a user to engage in the conversation.
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According to Bloomberg, the new “like” button began previous year with a challenge from Facebook’s Chief Product Officer Chris Cox.
As iconic and popular as the like button is (it gets clicked more often than people perform Google searches), it’s ironically not very versatile.
Also Wednesday, Facebook said its quartly profit more than doubled – to $5.84 billion from $3.85 billion in the same period a year earlier. “Facebook remains the fastest-growing platform for advertiser spending, and as they open up new channels for users, that won’t change”. The new feature has been dubbed Reactions by the Silicon Valley based tech firm, as it provides users with a variety of emojis to express their emotional reactions to posts. Those ended up being “angry”, “sad”, “wow”, “haha”, “yay”, and “love”. There were seven Reactions available when the feature first launched previous year, but Facebook made a decision to cut the Yay reaction because “it was not universally understood”.
Mark Zuckerberg says that Reactions are here to add “a little bit of complexity” to the simplest of Facebook interactions.
Zuckerberg’s net worth increased $4.85 billion to $46.25 billion, as Facebook stock climbed 12% in reaction to reports of Facebook’s strong quarterly earnings report.
So how does the rolling out of new animated emotions or Reactions benefit Facebook you ask?
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Facebook Reactions was widely embraced by users in testing countries past year.
