I ‘Love’ the new Facebook Reactions. I mean, ‘Wow’…

For those of you as obsessed with social media as me, you’ll no doubt know about the new ‘Facebook Reactions’, and by this, I’m talking about the global rollout of ‘Like, Love, Haha, Wow, Sad and Angry’ which happened yesterday. You may need to update your app if you’re using an Android or iPhone version of the app for them to show, but it’s already up and running on the desktop.

So, no longer are you limited to just the simple ‘like’. Instead, you are given a host of different emotions to better express how you feel about a particular status update. These were first piloted in Ireland, Japan and Spain late last year, and the 5 new emoticons received such a positive reaction, they’ve been pushed out worldwide.

Mark Zuckerberg, the mastermind behind Facebook says, ‘We want people to be able to share all the things that are meaningful to them, not just the things that are happy and people are going to ‘like’.

This seems like a fair point, if someone close to you isn’t well, and you share your support for them on Facebook, as many do, it seems slightly bizarre to ‘like’ that particular status. This doesn’t actually mean you like the fact that the person is ill – rather that you are showing your support through acknowledging that status update.  Well, these new reactions mean you can more accurately express yourself, which has to be a good thing, right?

Why those choices?

We all know that what we write on Facebook can be seen by the brains at Facebook HQ, and this development is a direct result of that. Through monitoring your comments on your friends’ posts, as well as emoji-like stickers you might have used, the chief ‘Facebookers’ were able to identify the most common ones, and then test those.

Moving forward, they will now be able to tailor your newsfeed more accurately to what you want to see. Currently, posts which receive the most ‘likes’ will rank higher on your newsfeed and will be more likely to show. This complex formula is about to get even more complex, as it will show you what it thinks you’re most interested in, whether that’s highly ranking ‘angry’ posts or something that generates a ‘wow’ or ‘love’ emoticon response instead.

How does this affect business accounts?

There’s so much potential with these new reactions where business Facebook pages are, as it changes the rules, and being able to monitor more accurately whether your customers ‘like, love, haha or wow’ your status update has got to be a good thing.

It’s already been said that companies won’t be able to block an ‘anger’ emoticon from being used on their status updates, so keeping a close eye on this, if it happens, is something all businesses need to be aware of moving forward. But equally, what if your customers are ‘sad’ or ‘angry’ with what you have to say? Well, any feedback is good feedback and, if used constructively, there’s no reason why these necessarily need to be a bad thing.

Playing catch up

There is a slight issue though, which I’m sure will be addressed in the very near future. This is with social media management software such as ‘Hootsuite’, which enables you to schedule and post to multiple social platforms at the same time – planning your posts and monitoring user engagement all on one platform.

These platforms currently don’t accommodate Facebook Reactions, but they really need to, and fast! For the world of social media marketing, it’s imperative to be able to accurately monitor how your customers interact with your Facebook business page, and therefore it’s about time the likes of Hootsuite catch up.

So, what are you waiting for? Hop onto Facebook and have a little look for yourself, and if you need any advice on how to manage your business social accounts, then get in touch today.