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What Are Facebook Reactions and How They Impact the Feed?

Royce Roy1761 25-Aug-2017

What Are Facebook Reactions and How They Impact the Feed?

Somebody rightly quoted: “We might be the masters of our own thoughts; still we are the slaves of our emotions”

In a world of bottled up emotions, Facebook already made its mark, when it appeared as one platform where people could vent out everything they felt, through their status updates. Beyond personal stuff, Facebook emerged as one medium where businesses could formally exhibit their products. While, happiness, sorrow, anger, humour all got worded up directly or indirectly and was easily conveyed, brands started building an emotional connect with their customers over the platform. As a common trait of human nature these exhibitions of statuses & products were not left unaddressed. While some people made the effort of replying in words and expressing their own take on other’s display, some just wanted to show a subtle & straight gesture. This is where the Facebook like button came into play and was on the go.

Within a span of 1 year after the Facebook Like button was introduced, people liked different entities of other’s exposition for about 300 billion times. Huge it was for Facebook to have exhibited something or the other on their platform that scored around 800 million likes per day. But was that enough? Was that really huge, with a tangled and eloquent brains like human?

Here’s where Facebook could again sense that these unconfined, infinite human emotions cannot be all expressed with just a “thumbs up”, but there is a lot more people want to release here on this imperative platform.May be a Thumbs down, a heart, a laugh etc. Facebook being a brilliant analyzer of human traits won over the millions of Facebookites with the release of more Facebook emojis, namely, Love, Haha, Wow, Sad & Angry.

Read Also: Facebook starts testing a Groups tab on its mobile app


How You Spill It Out:

Just like the usage of Like button, all other emojis can be used by holding the like button for a few microseconds and the 6 emojis will appear. You can choose one of them and it will appear with other people’s reaction under the post. Recently since March 2017, these reaction button are all ready to be spilt even on the messenger.

Special Gestured Emojis:

An overwhelming addition to the existing set of emojis were a few added up to the line on special occasions such as a purple daisy around Mother’s Day and Halloween one, exclusively for that event and for some specific countries.

How These Emotions (Reactions) Impact The News Feed:

It has been confirmed by Facebook that their matted algorithm of determining the quality of a news feed is majorly influenced by these reactions. Hence, these reactions, Love, Haha, Sad, Wow & Angry are more impactful determinant than the Likes for a content to appear above others in the news feed section.

Facebook recently divulged their belief recently to Mashable quoting:

“Over the past year we’ve found that if people leave a Reaction on a post, it is an even stronger signal that they’d want to see that type of post than if they left a Like on the post. So we are updating News Feed to weigh reactions a little more than Likes when taking into account how relevant the story is to each person.”

Though speculations suggest that Facebook weighs all reactions equally, there is this one reaction that outshined and upstaged all other reactions in the appalling year 2016. Much to everybody’s amaze, it was not the SAD but the LOVE reaction. To which stated, Reactions has been a labor of love for the Facebook team – one that it seems we users are grateful for.

Here’s one lesson for the brands: Create content to invite reactions from users and respond to them through the same. This can be one important practice to level up in the News feed arena of Facebook and attain impactful social presence.

So, get going and seek some love now!

Know more about such reaction grabbing campaigns with us.

Also Read: Facebook Now Allows You to Post Job Openings

Updated 07-Sep-2019

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