25 Feb Facebook ‘Reactions’ have arrived.
Another fantastic day yesterday for digital marketers as Facebook rolled out its reaction emojis on all content. For businesses and marketers, this is going to provide even more information about our brands, content marketing and consumer behaviour. This will also stimulate engagement which is a key to social media marketing.
So let’s look at the emojis and their meanings:
LIKE – The original like button stays at the front, allowing users to still give the thumbs up on posts. Where as this button provided us affirmation regarding our posts, the buttons value has now shifted. Will we be content with just the thumbs up, or we will we be wanting more of a reaction?
LOVE – This button I feel is going to be one of our favourites, if we see these outnumbering the thumbs up emoji, then you are going somewhere people! That little heart button is going to be powerful!
HAHA – The button benefits the likes of a comedian or a funny, personable business story. To make someone smile in life is fantastic, to make them laugh…well that’s up a whole new level. I am wondering why Facebook didn’t use the acronym LOL. However, Facebook would have carried out lots of research on this and LOL is one of those annoying words. Well, ‘sayings’!
WOW – Now this button is an absolute falling off the chair moment. This emoji really does mean you are have launched a rocket to the moon and set off fireworks and my eyes are going to literally fall out of my head!
SAD – This emoji represents empathy, could be good for charities when they post out content. It would be a good way to measure the impact of a campaign.
ANGRY – Good for news, media to monitor reactions. However, this is a dangerous emoji in my opinion and this is the one that is going to set the cat amongst the pigeons… will this encourage ‘trolling’ on particular posts. Whereas before we could only ‘like’ if we disagreed or found the post offensive, we couldn’t. We can now! I think on personal posts this could start causing problems in the future. But we will wait and see!
So, what will this do for Facebook marketing?
- Expect to see engagement go up, more reactions means more people reacting to your content.
- Precise information filtering through, you can analyse the different emotions created via the post.
- Measuring positive and negative impact on your brand / competitors.
- Encourage new business and leads, you will see who is literally ‘loving your work’ and who you need to win over.
- Engagement will never be the same, this will change how users engage now on Facebook forever (until the next change).
- Reputation on business pages will be even more visible. Whereas you could only like, you can now see instantly the variations of emotions attached to a particular post including negative emotions.
- Facebook strategies will need to be changed to coincide with the 1 click emotion. If you don’t this could sabotage your current efforts. Facebook have changed so your strategies need to change.
So the 6 new little faces that have just appeared under each post are going to be new friends now. They have a lot of power so respect them and use them to your advantage.
And … if Facebook has done this, then expect the other platforms to follow suit. Twitter recently changed theirs to a heart. I would imagine Instagram will change soon as well. I hope not as I find this platform the most positive and would hate to see negative reactions / emotions posted on images.
Anyway, I would like to revisit this topic in a couple of months and see what has happened, in the meantime I am off to go and WOW, HAHA & LOVE my way through Facebook!
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