It’s been a year since Facebook’s grand roll out of additional reactions to the Like button. Now the social networking giant has announced that a new set of ‘reactions’ are now a part of the News Feed.
Users had expressed their displeasure due to lack of expressivity while reacting to a post. Limited to the Like button icon, users found it unpleasant to hit Like to sensitive posts that required a more subtle reaction.
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.
Facebook stated in a blog post.
Facebook got to work soon after and has now reached upon five additional reactions after months of research. In order to use the newly introduced reactions, Facebook users have to long press on the Like button, which reveals the reactions of ‘love’, ‘haha’, ‘wow’, ‘sad’, and ‘angry’. Once the user hits the reaction on a post, on the News Feed the post displays the mixed reactions it received.
The much longed for ‘dislike’ button, has been kept out even after repeated attempts by some users to force Facebook to introduce it on News Feed.
Facebook began testing the new set of reactions with users in Spain and Ireland. An additional ‘confused’ and ‘yay’ reactions were eventually kicked out. Facebook stated that users in Spain and Ireland compared to other reactions, used ‘yay’ and ‘confused’ relatively lesser. Facebook’s News Feed team was looking for a set of universal reactions that were more likely to be used repeatedly.
We have been testing Reactions in a few markets since last year, and have received positive feedback so far. Today, we’re excited to offer it to everyone who uses Facebook around the world.
The iconic Like button is still prominent on a post in the News Feed, while the new set of reactions hide behind the icon. Now that the new set of reactions are here, Facebook has done away with the number of Likes for post and now shows the number of reactions to a post.
Mark Zuckerberg over a year ago took the idea of introducing different set of reactions instead of the simply Like button to his News Feed team. The team eventually reached on a set of reactions by carefully analysing people’s preferences and the type of reactions a post is likely to generate, which are universal. The reactions are available on iOS, Android, and the web starting today.
We understand that this is a big change, and want to be thoughtful about rolling this out. For more than a year we have been conducting global research including focus groups and surveys to determine what types of reactions people would want to use most. We also looked at how people are already commenting on posts and the top stickers and emoticons as signals for the types of reactions people are already using to determine which reactions to offer.
