Facebook’s ‘Reactions’ Are Coming – But Will They Be Good for Marketers?

As noted by Facebook’s chief product officer Chris Cox to Bloomberg - and re-affirmed by Mark Zuckerberg himself in this week’s Facebook full-year results announcement – Facebook’s ‘Reactions’ emoji toolbar will soon be made available to all users. For those unaware, ‘Reactions’, which The Social Network announced back in October, is a way to give Facebook users the ability to respond to posts with something other than 'Like'. The typical use-case of Reactions was explained by Zuckerberg at one of his regular Town Hall Q & A events last year:

“Not every moment is a good moment - if you share something that's sad, like a refugee crisis that touches you or a family member passes away, it may not be comfortable to like that post… I do think it's important to give people more options than liking it."

For a long time, Facebook users have called for a ‘dislike’ option, but Facebook has (rightly) deemed that too negative and a tool that could lead to a lesser user-experience. Their alternative solution was to develop a toolset which utilises the rising trend of emoji, as well as the most common, one-word responses used across Facebook’s network, to come up with a set of emoji-type responses which people will be able to use in place of the traditional 'thumbs up'.

Those emoji responses, based on Facebook's data, have been refined down to:

In their first iteration, there was also another option:

But initial testing among users in Spain and Ireland found that ‘Yay’ was often misunderstood - and really, it’s largely redundant either way, given users already have ‘Like’ and ‘Love’ as options.

In application, when a user clicks/taps and holds on ‘Like’, a new pop-up will appear from which they'll be able to choose a 'Reaction' that best fits their response.

So what do these new options mean for marketers? In a word: insight.

Some Facebook Pages already have a graph like the below, ready to track data from Reactions use within their Page Insights:

It’s evident from this that Facebook sees analytical value in Reactions, and they’re giving Page owners the tools to track them, straight up - though interestingly, Facebook's also made a point of noting that any ‘Reaction’, at least initially, will be measured as equivalent to a ‘Like’ in their system. So if someone clicks on your Facebook ad and selects ‘angry’ in response, that’ll actually increase the likelihood of them being shown more of the same content, because any reaction is counted as a ‘Like’, and within Facebook's algorithm, likes are indicative of preference. While it’s understandable that Facebook wouldn’t necessarily have a way to measure the true value of Reactions in the early stages of their roll-out, the measurement of a Reaction as a Like does raise an interesting query – if a user tags their response to something as ‘Angry’, does that mean they want to see more or less of that type of content?

This is where the complexity of Reactions comes into play –what do these responses mean, in terms of audience interest and intent? And then, how will marketers be able to use that insight to better refine and maximize their content? This'll be a big focus for social media marketing types over the next 12 months, and the only definitive way to establish what each Reaction means will come via experience and use. And even then, different Pages are going to see different results – a news service might see better engagement when they post content that generates more ‘Angry’ responses (as it’ll get more people talking about the topic, and thus, generate more reach), but then a brand selling natural soaps might see better website visits and conversion rates with posts that inspire more ‘Like’ or ‘Love’ reactions.

The only way to know for sure is through experimentation. The goal of all content is to generate an emotional response - emotion drives the majority of our responses after all (particularly in regards to purchases), so it makes sense, by extension, that having further insight into a users’ emotional responses to our content can only help inform our marketing decisions. But exactly what each response means, in a wider context, can only really be ascertained by seeing how it’s used across that expanded scope.

This is the same with all of Facebook’s data – one person deciding to ‘Like’ a Page in response to a post has little meaning in itself, but 1,000 people following the same path indicates a trend. When you extrapolate that across Facebook’s now 1.59 billion users, you can start to get an idea of how valuable even the simplest action might be, because it’s matched up against trillions of other data points and processes, and it’s in that wider sample size that genuine insight takes shape.

In this sense, the only way to know how valuable Reactions will be for marketers is to examine the data after they’ve been implemented and look for usage patterns and correlations. And they will be there. More data – especially more emotional data – can only be beneficial.

And at some stage, you may just find that Reactions data is able to highlight insights that would never have been discernible via Likes alone. Powerful, indeed.  

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Andrew Hutchinson is a freelance writer, tech blogger and social media marketing advisor from Melbourne, Australia. He is an internationally published author, an award-winning blogger, a Hootsuite Ambassador for the APAC region and one of the 'Best Thinkers' on Social Media Today. If you're looking for a writer or for social media or content advice, get in touch at the website or connect via Twitter:@adhutchinson