Facebook's Newest Feature

By: Brendan K.

The most uncomfortable thing is when people post bad news on Facebook and you feel weird liking it. I feel uncomfortable liking a post about someone’s dog dying because I don’t want them to think I’m happy for their loss. Don’t you wish that there was a way “dislike” a Facebook post? Well Facebook has once again catered to the needs of their users.

Facebook has made different way to “like” a status. The new options they have are “Like, Love, Haha, Wow, Sad, and Angry”. The purpose for this change is because people, like myself, don’t always like a post. You are now able to show many different emotions towards your friends.

This new feature can be useful for company blog posts because they can now see the reactions to what they say. Companies can use this to monitor their ads by seeing the reactions that people give to them. Because Facebook is the most widely used social media on the planet this should be a valuable tool for market researchers. But unfortunately that isn’t quite the case.

The Marketing teams for Facebook have every person calibrated differently. The ads that pop up on your feed are based towards the user. But now with the new reactions they will have to recalibrate it. The algorithm that is used when you like certain posts has remained the same. So if post any reaction to a post it will be taken as a like, but Facebook hopes to weight these reactions differently over time.

The issue that arises is when using the reactions Facebook isn’t able to tell exactly how you feel. If you “angry” an article about discrimination in the work place or “sad” an article about a natural disaster doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t want to see any of those articles anymore. Overall, the new reactions on Facebook will make it more complicated for marketers to interpret data, but currently for me I’m going to be using it to give my relatives the “angry” reaction on their ignorant posts.

Sources:

Greenberg, Julia. "Advertisers Don’t Like Facebook’s Reactions. They Love Them." Wired.com. Conde Nast Digital, 25 Feb. 2016. Web. 25 Feb. 2016.

Tsukayama, Hayley. "Facebook Officially Expands beyond the ‘like’." Washington Post. The Washington Post, 24 Feb. 2016. Web. 25 Feb. 2016.