A blog entry by SAMMI KRUG, Product Manager at Facebook, reveals that the new Reactions alternative to the Like button has gone live. Here is the announcement …
Every day, people come to Facebook to discover what’s happening in their world and around the world, and to share all kinds of things, whether that’s updates that are happy, sad, funny or thought-provoking. News Feed is the central way we can get updates about our friends, family and anything else that matters most to us, and the central place to have conversations with the people you care about. We’ve been listening to people and know that there should be more ways to easily and quickly express how something you see in News Feed makes you feel. That’s why today we are launching Reactions, an extension of the Like button, to give you more ways to share your reaction to a post in a quick and easy way.
To add a reaction, hold down the like button on mobile or hover over the like button on desktop to see the reaction image options, and then tap either Like, Love, Haha, Wow, Sad, or Angry.
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 international 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.
We have been testing Reactions in a few markets since last year, and have received positive feedback so far. Today, we’re excited to offer it to everyone who uses Facebook around the world. We will continue learning and listening to feedback to make sure we have a set of reactions that will be useful all over the world. We hope you enjoy the new Reactions!
* The new option may not appear immediately. It appears to be rolling our progressively across the world.
