Thumbs Up For Facebook's New Like Button

Every day people visit Facebook to share their lives with others and others share their lives with us. It’s a world full of happening news and events- confessions, proposals, announcements, congratulations, betrayals, separations- everything happens on Facebook. And a single Like button with its thumbs up wasn’t doing justice to all this. So, here comes an alternative. Not a Dislike button, for sure. It's called REACTIONS.

Facebook had been trying to build an alternative to its “like” button since a year. After all the studies and pre-tests, the company on 24th of this February launched "Reactions"- an extension of the like button with six new emojis: Like, Love, Haha, Wow, Sad and Angry. ‘Reactions’ comes across as a better tool of expression with its six variants.

Facebook explained the new feature, called Reactions, in a blog post: “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.”

“When people get to Facebook, they share all kinds of different things, sad, happy, thought-provoking, angry things. We kept hearing from people that they didn’t hold the option to express compassion," said Facebook product manager Sammi Krug. “We learned that people would enjoy more ways to denote themselves on Facebook”.

Colombia, Chile, Ireland, Spain, the Philippines, Portugal, and Japan were the first ones to receive "Reactions" set. In Spain, ‘Love’ has been the most popular “Reaction” across countries so far. “Reactions” will also help Facebook hike clicks," said Krug.

This feature has been welcomed by all the advertisers also, as now they can learn more about users through data on their enthusiastic response to content.

Initially, the team's concern was that covering “Reactions” behind the “like” button might make the feature difficult for users, but that hasn’t been the case.