Your News Feed is about to get more emotional, except this time not in a creepy, manipulative way. This time, the Like button is getting an update that will let users react to posts to be more emotionally expressive.
First tested in a handful of countries last year, in addition to “Like” users can now “love”, “haha”, “wow”, “sad”, and “angry” posts. No more do you have to “like” your friend’s break up post – unless you still want to.
Each reaction has a different emoji attached to it, ones that have a close resemblance to several, more established Unicode characters. The Facebook team worked hard on which reactions to use, how the emoji will look and which ones were the most popular.
Facebook Reactions work universally on mobile and desktop, no matter what your operating system is. On mobile, users need only to briefly long-press on the standard Like button for the emoji to show up. On the desktop, users hover the mouse pointer over the Like button.
“We understand that this is a big change, and want to be thoughtful about rolling this out. For more than a year we have been conducting global research including focus groups and surveys to determine what types of reactions people would want to use most. We also looked at how people are already commenting on posts and the top stickers and emoticons as signals for the types of reactions people are already using to determine which reactions to offer.”
Source: Facebook Newsroom
