Social media giant Facebook has finally replaced the iconic ‘Like’ button with 6 different reactions. The like button, while effective, wasn’t very emotive and rather than ‘like’ someone’s status about a dead loved on, we wanted more emotion that conveyed our empathy. So, after over a year of research, Facebook has come up with six different emotions that can be universally used.
What are these 6 emotions you ask? They are Like, Love, Haha, Wow, Sad, and Angry. Although it is hard to narrow down the plethora of emotions we have every day, it was actually not feasible for Facebook to include all of them (or maybe it will be in the future). The point was to come up with feelings that can be translated universally due to Facebook’s global presence.
So how do the new Facebook reactions work?
If you are in front of your desktop, you need to hover your mouse over the like button to select from different reactions. On your phone, you need to hold the like button a bit for the other options to pop out.
How does this help Facebook?
Facebook gets precious analytics of which emotion is used the most while expressing a particular sentiment. The common guess is love, but we may be surprised at what the analytics may churn out. Also, Facebook has been pretty redundant and it seems like Mark Zuckerberg figured it out too. In order to keep up with the times, he made a few changes to Facebook, one of the biggest one of course, is the ability to upload profile videos! By giving users more options to emote better in the virtual world, I think it is safe to say that Facebook is going to be here for some more time and not fade away like its competition, Orkut (yeah there was something like that).
As for future plans, it all depends on how well this update is received. If this goes well, Facebook may add more and more emotions accordingly, thus making the virtual space a little more real.
*The update has been rolled out but it may be a day or two by the time you get it. So don’t fret if everyone else has gotten it but you haven’t.
*All images sourced from Google.