Facebook Begins Test Run Of ‘Reactions’ Emoji

Last month, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg received a lot of attention when he hinted that the social media giant was working on a way to expand its famous “Like” button. The vague announcement didn’t indicate that the company was going to add the much-fabled “dislike” button, but instead that it was going to make the option more empathetic, to express sadness and other emotions.

Today, Facebook is unveiling details about what form the new Like button may take. The company is now rolling out “Reactions,” a new set of six emoji that will exist alongside the original thumbs-up, allowing users to quickly respond indicating love, laughter, shock, anger and sadness.

“As you can see, it’s not a ‘dislike’ button, though we hope it addresses the spirit of this request more broadly,” wrote Facebook’s chief product officer, Chris Cox, in a post. “We studied which comments and reactions are most commonly and universally expressed across Facebook, then worked to design an experience around them that was elegant and fun.”

The company explained that the pop-up feature will start out as a test in two markets only, Spain and Ireland, before the company decides whether to tweak it and/or roll it out further. Adam Mosseri, Facebook’s director of product, explained that the company picked these two countries because they both have primarily national user bases without extensive international friend networks, making them effective to use as closed test groups.

A small set of reactive emoji is already a familiar interface for social media users, with networks like Path and websites like Buzzfeed providing users with the ability to respond to posts with reactions beyond simple likes and favorites.

Facebook’s new set of Reactions will appear across both mobile and desktop versions of the app and on all posts in the News Feed, whether they are from friends, Pages/accounts that the user follows, or advertisers.

The new feature will be particularly useful on mobile, where it is more difficult to type. Also, by offering different emoji, Facebook will start to tally and show those different responses. So, just as today you can see how many people and who Liked a post, with the new feature you will also be able to see which people loved it, found it sad, thought it was shocking, and so on.

For Page owners and publishers, this data collection will also eventually make its way to Facebook’s analytics dashboard. Auto dealerships will be able to garner more granular data about how people are emotionally responding to their content on the social network, which will help marketers refine and improve their ad campaigns and social media content. In fact, about half of Facebook’s blog post about Reactions was aimed at what the change means for businesses.

“We see this as an opportunity for businesses and publishers to better understand how people are responding to their content on Facebook,” wrote Facebook product manager Chris Tosswill.

During the test, Page owners will be able to see Reactions to all of their posts on Page Insights. Hopefully this initial phase will go well so that Facebook decides to roll the feature out widely, as it could provide valuable information to auto dealership marketers in the future.