By Jonathan Walsh
Rabat - Starting from today Facebook will allow users to respond to posts in a variety of ways, making the simple action of ‘liking’ history.
A variety of buttons will open to let users express their opinions on their friends’ posts including ‘love’, ‘sad’ and ‘angry’.
These expressions, along with ‘haha’, ‘wow’ as well as ‘like’ appear when readers hover over the like button.
The introduction of this new feature comes after users had long requested an alternative to ‘like’, which some had commented wasn’t applicable to many posts people make - such as posts relating to illness or natural disasters.
Other buttons, such as ‘yay’ or ‘confused’ were trialed in a pilot that took place in Japan, Ireland, and Spain last October, but were deemed to be excessive.
"We will initially use any Reaction similar to a Like to infer that you want to see more of that type of content," they said in a blog post.
One of the most appealing benefits from Facebook’s perspective is that trials showed with the broader range of ways to react, the amount of people engaging with friend’s posts increases dramatically. This boost in engagement could increase Facebook’s income, as advertisers will be able to learn more about how different users respond to different events, and tailor their advertisements accordingly.
In an interview with Buzzfeed, Facebook engineering director Tom Alison made clear that the changes to the site would not be stopping here.
“This is just the beginning,” he said, “The team is still going to be looking at how people are using this. We’re going to be learning a lot. We’re going to be iterating on this.”
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