You’re scrolling your Facebook newsfeed catching up on your friends activities. Your neighbor just brought home a new puppy, your high school friend just discovered her grandmother has breast cancer and your classmate just made a hilarious new video. All of these situations spur different emotional responses. You might want to let the neighbor know you’re excited for them, let the high school friend know are saddened by the news and let the classmate know you think their video is great. To show this, you ‘like’ their post. Well, that is until yesterday.
Yesterday Facebook launched ‘Reactions,’ a new way for users to respond to post on their timeline. Instead of just being able to like a post, Facebook users can choose from 6 different emotions: like, love, haha, wow, sad and angry.
When you use Facebook on the computer if you hover over the link button the different reactions appear, allowing you to choose from them. And on the phone, you can find reactions by holding down the like button. Once someone has responded to a post with a reaction that is different than ‘like,’ the reaction emoticons will show up layered under the like button.
When Facebook changes any part of their user interface it’s big news – so adding this feature was a definite conversation starter. Facebook has worked for over a year to narrow down the emotions that they would use, working with psychologists and testing them in different countries.
For users, reactions are a fun new way to interact with your friends on Facebook – and with the growing political speech from the elections, I can see the ‘anger’ and ‘wow’ face being used frequently – but for advertisers these can provide a whole new metric for measuring an advertiements success. And if a person frequently reacts with ‘love’ or ‘haha’ to videos about a certain subject, the advertisers have even better ideas of what kind of advertisements to target to those customers.
This new feature could have a major impact on the way that companies push content to users. Chevy has already taken advantage of the hype around the new Facebook feature with their Malibu ad. The one minute video focuses on all the different reasons we like posts, and how now we should love the new Ford Malibu. The video was realeased on Wednesday, just in time for Faceboook members to share it when they discovered the new reactions feature. This was a great way for Ford to hijack the converstaiton and hype around the reactions addition and make it apply to their company. Watch the ad here.
What do you think about the new ‘Reactions’ feature? Let me know in the comments!
Anderson Sullivan 