How Facebook's New Emoticons

can Help your Brand

Last week the all mighty facebook made an announcement surrounding the highly anticipated expansion of their like button. The announcement involved the introduction of ‘Reactions’, a set of 7 emoticon like buttons aiming to provide facebook users with the ability to show a larger range of emotions when responding to posts.

 

The reaction buttons include the good old ‘Like’ represented by the trusty thumbs up, as well as ‘Love’, ‘Haha’, ‘Yay’, ‘Wow’, ‘Sad’ and ‘Anger’, all represented by emoticons very similar to their most relatable emoticon smileys.

You may not have noticed but the reactions are more biased towards positive emotions. Rather than simply capturing the broadest range of emotions in as few icons as possible, facebook has inclined towards positive. If you compare the range of emotions to that included in the recent Pixar film ‘Inside Out’ you would notice that ‘joy’ can take the place of a number of reactions while ‘Disgust’ and ‘fear’ and nowhere to be seen. Facebook stated that the change was to keep the platform positive and optimize the news feed experience, so this is exactly what they do.

 

So what does this all mean for businesses and advertisers?

 

The new reaction buttons will display in the same way as the ‘Like’ button but will allow page managers to better monitor how people are reacting to their page and content. The greater range of emotions available will improve understanding of how users are interpreting their posts. Previously some users may have engaged with a post but not responded to it due to a lack of a function allowing them to express how they really feel. Now advertisers and businesses will be able to use this extra knowledge they gain from their customers to product better content more likely to get higher levels of responses.