QUEZON City, Philippines (February 18) – Facebook is the most popular and most commonly-used social networking site. People love this because of its accessibility and simple features. You can post your pictures and ideas, have conversation through chat, comment on your friends’ posts and share and agree on other’s perspective. It’s easy, all you have to do is hit the “like” button.
From the start, the “like” button has confused several people. The big question is why “dislike” button is not included alongside the “like” button. As a response, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook said that he feels a “dislike” button could convey too much negativity. In order to address this, Facebook has come up with the idea of putting new emoji reaction buttons. As a replacement of “dislike” button, Facebook has added six new alternative emoji reactions in order to answer their questions. It includes “love”, “haha”, “wow”, “sad” and “angry”. This newly created reactions would makes the site’s users more expressive and empathic
These emoji reactions were studied carefully before they were introduced. Facebook has monitored and researched on the popular emoticons that are commonly used by the people to express their feelings. According to the theverge.com, Facebook tracked the emotional sentiments of the sticker comments that users were leaving on their friends’ posts. The addition of sticker comments last year gave Facebook another signal as it developed reactions. Stickers are all tagged with emotional sentiments — it’s why Facebook’s sticker search works so well — and so it was easy for the company to see which sentiments were most popular.
As they finished establishing these new emoji reactions, Facebook first let the pop-up feature to be accessible in Spain and Ireland as start out test in two markets only. According to the interview in TechCrunch, Adam Mosseri, Facebook’s Director of Product, said the two countries were picked because both are markets where users tend not to have as many international connections on Facebook, making them work well as a test bed. Additionally, Spain will serve as a good test ground for how non-English speakers will respond to the emoji.
But, with these additional reactions, “like button” remains the most popular. Why? Is it because some people don’t know to use the new ones? Or some prefer to use the original?
The new created reactions buttons are the extension of existing “like” button. Based from a write-up from techcrunch.com, these appeared across both mobile and desktop versions of the app and on all posts in the News Feed — be they from friends, pages or accounts you follow, or advertisers. These reactions can easily be used. On mobile, the emoji will come up when you touch the like button on your screen; on desktop they will come up as you hover the mouse over the like or click on it. These new reaction buttons gives a wider view to express the emotions and feelings more of the face book users. You can show love, happiness, shock, sadness and anger. To sum it up, these new buttons are very easy to use. So, why does the “like” button remain popular?
On average, the “Like” and “Share” buttons are viewed across almost 10 million websites daily. It means that with these numerous users of “like” and “share” buttons, people have already found comfort in using them. They still prefer to use the “like” button because they are more comfortable with what they’re used to. In short, “like” button is still popular because people have not yet absorbed this new way of expressing emotions.
(written by Jasmin Monte, edited by Jay Paul Carlos, additional research by Lovely Ann Cruz)