How To Use Facebook’s New Reactions Emoji? (The Right Way)

Facebook’s New Reactions: Every day millions of users log into their Facebook accounts to discover what’s going on in their friends’ lives around the globe, exploring new trends or building new connections. The most common way is through News Feed, which provides all the updates posted by the friends, family & pages liked. 

Facebook launched ‘Reactions’ in February 2016 after year-long testing to help millions of users to interact with a post, status update, or article in a better way.

For example, if a post is regarding the demise of a closed one or an update with which a user disagrees with, it seems unfitting in such a situation to like the post or update.

In such a situation, rather than liking the post, ‘sad’ or ‘angry’ reaction seems a better way to express one’s emotions.

Guide To Use Facebook’s New Reactions Emoji

Users can now use the ‘like’ button to find a complete set of reactions consisting of like, love, haha, wow, sad and angry appears.

The user can tap onto the reaction as per his/her desired emotion, although the like button, comment, and share options remain the same.

Some people still argue about the introduction of the ‘Dislike’ button instead. But it is clear that disliking certain content such as photos, etc. increases negativity upon the platform.  Hence, Reactions are far better than a dislike button. 

CEO Mark Zuckerberg also commented on the ‘Dislike’ button, saying, “We’re not going to build that, and I don’t think there needs to be a voting mechanism on Facebook about whether posts are good or bad. I don’t think that’s dislike button is socially very valuable or good for the community, and neither it helps people share the important moments in their lives.”

How This New Facebook Update Will Help Brands – The Business Perspective 

Reactions have mutual benefits to the users – the freedom to interact expressively and to businesses. The marketers – the opportunity to understand how the audience is reacting to their social media content.

Understanding what their target audience likes or dislikes is crucial for every business. All page owners on Page insights can see the reactions given to any content or post.

Thus, Page owners can evaluate their social media strategy/content marketing trends or strategy and optimize accordingly as per their audience’s reactions.

To exploit reactions even more for better growth, it is essential to understand how reactions affect the News Feed Algorithm. Let’s dig deep now.

How Reactions Affect Facebook’s News Feed Algorithm?

Facebook used to rank the posts or updates liked by the user higher so that each users’ news feed doesn’t become repetitive and boring.

With just the ‘like’ button, the user doesn’t precisely specify what he/she feels about the content.

However, now, with reactions, this data becomes more precious and specific. It helps Facebook to differentiate what posts are being enjoyed, what fascinates a particular user, and what saddens him/her.

This elaborates the whole purpose of utilizing reactions as the ‘like’ button was a limiting response. It only described the type of content a user would like to be interested in. These reactions help to understand how one felt about a particular post.

Hence, the reactions do weigh a little higher than likes alone in News Feed Algorithm. While all the reactions currently weigh the same. 

The ideal mix of content on News Feed ensures that the user spends more time on the social media platform, implying watching more ads, thus generating revenue.

Advertisers will be able to find how the target audience is reacting to their ads boosting in organic reach.

For example, an empathetic or emotional ad will garner ‘love’ reactions or a ‘funny’ ad. That will have a higher ‘haha’ reaction. So, based on the number of these reactions, the marketer can optimize their campaign.

Apart from this, data from reactions enables advertisers to understand where to place the ad. i.e. to avoid ad placements near posts that have more angry reactions.

As this will degrade the chances of potential customers to visit the link. Instead of this, they can plan to place ads in proximity to most liked content.

One important thing is that reactions have the same impact as likes used to have upon ad delivery.

The EndNote

Thus, Facebook’s ‘reactions’ set is a handy tool for advertisers and page owners. To improve their strategy to offer what their users actually like and discard what doesn’t work for them.

As it seems, in the near future with the refinement of algorithms; marketers and advertisers should focus on actively responding to user reactions for achieving social success.