Facebook gets 5 new emoji to compliment the “like” button

The “Like” button condensed our emotions into one single symbol on Facebook and now the social media giant is expanding it to six, by adding five more internationally recognized emotions and calling the whole bunch “Reactions”. Instead, Facebook is rolling out five more Reactions to let users more accurately express their response. We’ll see how other users react to the new Reaction system when it rolls out to the rest of the world in the coming weeks.

Facebook has been testing these options in several other countries and recently rolled them out in Japan.

Facebook’s answer to pleas for a dislike button is actually much more forward thinking than what anyone might have thought of.

Reactions, as Facebook is calling it, will offer users a range of emojis in addition to the standard thumbs-up that, till now, has been synonymous with the Like button.

The new reactions will be animated buttons to help display the meanings.

“Yay” was originally slated to be the sixth response although it was eliminated during testing as it wasn’t universally understood.

Reactions debuted as part of a small pilot program in Ireland and Spain, before trickling out to Chile, Portugal, the Philippines and Colombia, last year.

Maybe you’d prefer to click on a Sad button or a Love button or a Wow button.

“You always want to make your service as effortless as possible, and Facebook is very aware of that design goal”, said Gottheil.

The social networking site’s Chief Product Officer Chris Cox, who has led the initiative to give a facelift to the Like button, has officially confirmed that Facebook Reactions is set to go global. If, for example, you were to continually use the angry reaction on posts about Donald Trump, you might see fewer posts about him. And such data could be a goldmine for Facebook’s advertising business. It just felt different to use Facebook that day. “It enables advertisers to be incredibly sophisticated about how they post their ads, refining them constantly”, he said.