Facebook Messenger has just hit another milestone, and it’s not in terms of downloads. It’s actually in terms of one of Facebook Messenger’s newest features, reactions. While reactions have been available for Facebook for quite some time, it only launched on Facebook Messenger in March, and over 2 billion reactions have been used on Messenger since it launched. To break that down by day, that’s about 30 million reactions on average, being used every single day.
Facebook does also have some analytics available for reactions, they’ve found that users that are between 18 and 24 years old will be more likely to use reactions than older age groups. That’s not to surprising, since that is the millennial age group, the group that has grown up with technology and social media. Facebook also notes that positive reactions are much more popular than angry or sad. The “love” reaction is most common in most countries, including the US and Mexico, while the “yes” reaction is common in Canada, France, India, the UK and Australia. And Vietnam is the only one that uses the laughing reaction more than everyone else. Which is a pretty interesting statistic.
Reactions were added to Facebook Messenger to give users another way to interact with their friends in Messenger. For example, instead of typing in “cool” when your friend shares some news, you can simply use one of these reactions to reply to their message. These aren’t quite the same reactions as what Facebook uses on status updates, but they are mostly the same thing. They do look a bit different. Now the popularity of reactions shouldn’t be surprising, especially considering how much similarity they have with emojis, which are very, very popular among the age group that uses reactions the most. Emojis have become the next big thing over the past few years, and companies have been working to incorporate them into their products, including social networks like Facebook, Twitter and others. Twitter takes a different approach though, adding special emojis to hashtags instead of using reactions for things like status updates and such, but that’s also due to how its platform works.