Facebook’s dislike button takes form of emojis

FACEBOOK is expanding its emotional range. The social networking company said it is finally letting users do more than "like" what they see in their news feed, a move that businesses may favour with a thumbs up.

FACEBOOK is expanding its emotional range. The social networking company said it is finally letting users do more than “like” what they see in their news feed, a move that businesses may favour with a thumbs up.

Agencies Facebook users can hold down the like button of a post to express emotions captured by seven different emojis: angry; sad; wow; yay; haha; love; and the traditional like.

“It’s not a ‘dislike’ button, though we hope it addresses the spirit of this request most broadly,” Facebook chief product officer Chris Cox wrote in a post on Facebook. “We studied which comments and reactions are most commonly and universally expressed across Facebook, then worked to design an experience around them that was elegant and fun.”

Called Reactions, the feature is initially available in Ireland and Spain. Facebook product manager Chris Tosswill said in a blog post that the company would learn from this initial roll-out what worked and what did not before making the change for all users.

There is a business side to the new feature. Half of Facebook’s blog post about Reactions is aimed at what the change means for businesses. “We see this as an opportunity for businesses and publishers to better understand how people are responding to their content on Facebook,” wrote Mr Tosswill.

During the test, Page owners will be able to see Reactions to all of their posts on Page insights.

Facebook had previously indicated that this was in the works. At a live-streamed Q&A session at the Facebook headquarters in September, CE Mark Zuckerberg said for the first time that the social network was working on something akin to a dislike button. Mr Zuckerberg said then that Facebook wanted to limit the use of the button to expressing sympathy when someone posted something sad or upsetting.

He clarified at that time that Facebook had found that users did not want to vote down others, but instead would like to express support when someone shared something sad.

“What they really want is an ability to express sympathy,” Mr Zuckerberg said. “If you’re expressing something sad … it may not feel comfortable to ‘like’ that post, but your friends and people want to be able to express that they understand.”

Bret Taylor, Facebook’s former chief technology officer who is widely credited with inventing the like button, said the original like was conceived as a way to acknowledge a post, much in the way people nod during conversations with friends. Under Mr Taylor, Facebook expanded the like button beyond its site and built the plug-in that people use to share content to Facebook.

Some experts say a wider range of emotional options will give Facebook more insight into what interests its users. “It’s a win for Facebook as a data-driven company,” said Andrea Forte, assistant professor of social computing at Drexel University. “It creates a more controlled vocabulary that Facebook can use to understand what people’s responses are to items in their news feed.”

But Mr Taylor said adding features was tricky because it did not necessarily lead to more engagement. He added that the like button’s power came from its simplicity and adding options to the screen would be “an additional cognitive load” for users.