What Facebook Reactions Mean For Social Media

By Judy Lee ‘17 

Recently, Facebook announced their new emotion rating features on the site. Now, instead of “like” or…not like, there are a various range of emotions users can express when it comes to their newsfeeds. Similar to how Buzzfeed comments work, a lot has opened up on the platform. Here’s what it means:

New conversations

Mark Zuckerberg mentioned in his statement that sometimes, life requires more than a “like” and you have emotions that can’t be encapsulated by that simple button. The introduction of these new features will now be able to open up a more intricate sense of how a post is being received by the Facebook community. The dilemma that previous existed regarding what to do when a post is sad, but you want to show solidarity, has now been resolved by emojis like “sad” and “angry”. 

A shift away from black and white performance indicators

This means a lot for social media analysis. It makes quantifying and distilling information from analytics that much accurate (yet complicated). For instance, if a post is meant to incite anger within a fan base, a lot of “angry” buttons would be a good thing where it wouldn’t have been quantified as such before.

 Conversely, is “love” the new thing for Facebook pages to strive for? Which is better: 200 loves or 2,000 likes? 50 likes or 500 hahas? This is a conversation that now needs to be had when setting social media goals.

As always, social media is ever-changing. Will this change the way social media allows users to express themselves? Probably not as “landmark” as one may think. However, it is definitely a step that suggests Facebook is not afraid to deviate from its iconic “like” feature. Although not as daring as YouTube’s decision to launch YouTube Red, if those two power moves are possible, who knows what other big moves will be made by other social media websites like Twitter and Instagram.