It's official. Facebook has changed – Facebook Reactions are available globally. Starting today, everywhere in the world Facebook users can discover new functions of the well known Like button. What was the idea behind this change? Let's find out more about it.
How to use it
It is simple and intuitive. To choose a reaction you have to hold down on the Like button and just wait until the reactions icons appear and accept one of them. That's it. You can choose from: like, love, haha, wow, sad and angry icon. What was the idea behind the whole change? Why those emotions and icons? Now you can express your sympathy, confusion or excitement. It is much more than just thumb up/thumb down option. Facebook resigned from using Dislike button on purpose, after deep consideration, in order to avoid possible hateful actions.
What Facebook has to say about Facebook Reactions
What was the idea behind the whole change? Why those emotions and icons not the others? Sammi Krug, Facebook Product Manager describes the idea of this fundamental change in these words:
“Every day, people come to Facebook to discover what’s happening in their world and around the world, and to share all kinds of things, whether that’s updates that are happy, sad, funny or thought-provoking. News Feed is the central way you can get updates about your friends, family and anything else that matters to you, and the central place to have conversations with the people you care about. We’ve been listening to people and know that there should be more ways to easily and quickly express how something you see in News Feed makes you feel. That’s why today we are launching Reactions, an extension of the Like button, to give you more ways to share your reaction to a post in a quick and easy way.”
You can find more information in Facebook newsroom.
Research
Before Facebook implemented any change, it had conducted a wide research to define what types of reaction people would want to express via Facebook buttons. They have been testing various options on different markets for months. Moreover, Facebook researchers looked into previous ways in which people used to describe their feeling in comments (like hearts, emoticons). They gathered all the feedback and brought us the new features on 24th of February 2016, as it was announced.
Vanishing ‘Yay' reaction
There already has been a bit of confusion with one of reactions – the Yay icon. Orginally it was propoused among the others but then it has vanished. According to Facebook it wasn't understand corectly by everybody. Facebook decided the Yay icon is to be gone from the list.
What do you think about it? Like it, love it or hate it? How it will change the way we manage social media and what influence will it make on our lives and bussinesses?
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