Facebook is always changing, growing and adding new ideas, but one simple upgrade has been a long time coming – we will finally be able to actually ‘react’ to posts on Facebook, rather than merely ‘Like’ the posting – however, we still cannot ‘Dislike’ a post. The new ‘reactions’ are rolling out globally over the next few days after being tested in a few markets since last year. It may take a day or two for them to show up on your smartphone, but they are active for your PC or laptop. It seems you are able to react only to the initial posting, not to someone’s reply – the ‘like’ feature is still available for replies.
In addition to the usual ‘Like,’ we now have the choice of ‘Love,’ ‘Haha,’ ‘Wow,’ ‘Sad’ and ‘Angry’ to express what we think about the post, but still no ‘Dislike’. They are painless enough to use, simply hover over the ‘Like’ reaction and the other choices will pop-up, roll over on top of the one you want and ‘click,’ or if on your smartphone, hover over the reaction you want and release. The top three reactions will show up under the message to give you an idea of what people think about the post. The original poster will receive a message that somebody ‘reacted’ to their post.
It is certainly about time that Facebook expanded their ‘reactions’ because ‘like’ is simply not appropriate to use for certain posts. Who wants to ‘like’ the fact that your pet passed away or that you are going in to have surgery? Sammi Krug, the product manager behind Reactions said that Zuckerberg took user feedback to heart when he kept hearing “feedback from people that there wasn’t an easy way to express empathy for these different kinds of posts. One of the things we really wanted to be careful of, is will this translate well. We wanted these reactions to be globally understood. Once this actually rolls out, we’ll learn more about how people use the feature [and] we’ll continue to iterate it over time, based on user feedback.” He said that Facebook is in no way tied into these reactions, but could add more or change them over time…possibly a ‘dislike’ reaction?