Now You Can Be 'Sad' Instead Of Giving A 'Like' When Your Friend Loses His Cat
Introducing, Reactions by Facebook.
By John Lim — 25 Feb 2016, 01:28 PM
That's right, you could use a sad reaction to show support for your friend! The social media giant has rolled out Reactions - an extension of the Like button.
CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg announced the release yesterday with short write-up detailing the platform needed a more nuanced way for users to interact with posts, for the obvious reason that not every post is likable.
Essentially, the Reactions are very similar to the Likes. Hold down the Like button on the app (or hover over it with your mouse if you're on browser) to view the all the Reactions.
The Reactions are only available to use on posts, pictures and videos at the moment, not on individual comments.
Aside from letting us easily and quickly express how we feel on the News Feed, the roll out is also a bid to increase user engagement
Facebook's rollout of Reactions is a bid by the company to increase user engagement on News Feed as the social platform gains more and more mobile users. It has been reported in November that Facebook users are posting less on the social network, but are more likely to Like posts.
npr.orgHowever, it wasn't a change that Facebook took lightly. The reactions took years of research and development.
Facebook started its research more than a year ago by studying the ways people were already expressing themselves on the social network through stickers and emoticons. Facebook also carried out focus groups and surveys to see how people would react to different emojis.
Facebook also worked with professors specializing in non-verbal communication at the University of California, Berkeley to help make the emojis human and relatable.
Facebook Product Manager Sammi Krug also said that changes would be made to the reactions, not ruling out adding new Reactions or putting them in more places on Facebook in the future
She said the company will continue to gather feedback on the feature and could tweak it down the line. While the company doesn’t have plans right now to expand Reactions to other Facebook-owned apps like Instagram and WhatsApp, the feature could carry over to other apps in the future.
forbes.com