Facebook’s “Reactions” is what the company plans for people to show empathy to posts

There was a lot of conversation about what Mark Zuckerberg said when he answered a question about the possibility of adding a dislike button on Facebook. The fact is that he announced that the company was working on a button that will allow users to share empathy instead. Now according to TechCrunch, it has been revealed that Facebook’s solution is by using emojis.

These emojis ( Angry, Sad, Wow, Yay, Haha and Love)  are called “Reactions”  and can be expanded by clicking on an emoji button that is between the like and comment buttons. This is how they would look like:

According to Facebook’s director of product, Adam Mosseri, who was interviewed by Techcrunch, the new feature will be tested in only two countries (Spain and Ireland) because they “both have largely national user bases without extensive international friend networks.” This means that they are ideal to get results because in Ireland, they are English speakers and Spain will serve as the other benchmark to see how it fares well with non-English users.

This functionality will also be used in analytics where social media managers can be able to get metadata of the sentiment around a post. This can be useful since Facebook can now tweak its advertisement algorithms so that they can provide current and future clients sentiment data.

How about the eventual rollout? It will be rolled out to the mobile apps and the desktop versions where you will be able to use them on your newsfeed and Pages alike. It may be not necessary to update the chat apps (Messenger and Whatsapp) with this because people use them to chat and already express their empathy using emojis. However, for Instagram, it may be a good idea to add the extra emojis next to the “love” emoji. For now, we have to wait for a global release to be able to use the new emoji based empathy buttons.