Dive Brief:

• Facebook has rolled out five new emotion-based icons called "Reactions" to all users after previously announcing they would be adding ways for users to react to posts beyond the "like" button.
• Facebook posts still offer the "like" button, but now users can hover over the button on desktop (or hold down on mobile) to gain access to five new emojis representing “Love,” “Haha,” “Wow,” “Sad,” and “Angry.”
• Facebook users have long complained the “like” button is too one-dimensional and isn't an appropriate way to react to certain posts, such as when people post sad or disturbing news. 

Dive Insight:

The roll-out of "Reactions" is a fundamental change to Facebook and should interest marketers in a couple of ways.

For starters, brands can now get a more nuanced view of engagement sentiment on their Facebook pages. From an advertising standpoint, Facebook will be putting this new data set to use for ad targeting and placement. As a hypothetical example, an advertiser might not want their sponsored post appearing next to a post on someone’s timeline that is getting a large number of “sad” or “angry” clicks.

However, in a blog post announcing Reactions’ global rollout, Facebook did not comment on any marketing implications for the new icons.

“For more than a year we have been conducting global research including focus groups and surveys to determine what types of reactions people would want to use most,” wrote Facebook product manager Sammi Krug in the blog post. “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.”