After over a year, are brands using reactions on Facebook the best they can?
Facebook realised about 2 years ago that users felt they couldn’t express their feelings with just a Like button. They share all kinds of different things, things that make them sad, happy, provoke a thought, angry. But they said they didn’t have a way to express empathy.
After a long and hard process of analysing how else do users express themselves on Facebook, it gave its users exactly what they needed. It let users express love, happiness, the feeling of being wowed, sadness, and anger other than, of course, the good old Like.
It’s been more than a year now, but are brands making the best of it? Let see.
In this past year the Reactions have given marketers, at most, a nuanced validation that their content engages their audience or not. Creative heads have had to choose more precisely, even more now, about the type of reactions they want for their brands. A risk that brands have now is, if users are reacting negatively with the sad or angry reactions then just like you can’t remove a like you can’t remove the negative reactions.
You may ask…
What about advertising?
As far as advertising on Facebook is concerned, it treats all reactions equally in its ad reports. For a breakdown of all reactions one could see their brand’s page insights.
Has it helped customer service?
As fas as customer service is concerned, these reactions have given another way to know whether their intervention is needed. You’d want to attend to an angry customer and the new reactions would give you a precise list of people who are angry with your service and have expressed so.
What do the reactions tell us?
There is no doubt that knowing whether your fans on Facebook love, are sad, are wowed, or so on by your product / service is one extra metric. That too, a metric that gives us a direct insight into how a user felt as soon as they saw a piece of content that was targeted to them. However, other than a perception analysis marketeers cannot read too much into reactions. Unless, Facebook could allow targeting only the users who “Loved” our content in the previous campaigns. Wouldn’t that be nice. (This hasn’t happened so far though)
What has it meant for a brands’ overall perception?
Since page posts are public, it’s important to understand that everyone can see the breakdowns of Facebook reactions, including people who are not admins and not even fans of the page. This means that you can go to other pages and see the breakdowns of reactions on their posts as well.
This can be useful for competitor research as you can gauge how people will react to specific types of content, status updates, and announcements — especially since you can get a quick summary of the reactions right at the top without having to scroll through the entire list.
How have the marketeers been using these?
- Reactions have been used as proxies for emotions that the user has for a certain brand and/or their content.
- These have been used used as CTAs (call to action) for user engagement.
- The reaction responses have meant a more loyal or engaged fan.
The reactions have not worked as well as Facebook had hoped. The reason is simpler than you’d imagine. It is because when the interaction design was planned a hover-display-click interaction was chosen over a plain display of all reactions with numbers mentioned under them that one could click on and have as short an interaction as one would have for a like button. Users have expressed that sometimes in their busy feed scrolling lives they do not take as much effort as to hover, wait for the reactions to display and then click. Most of the times the old click the like button interaction is what you have time for.
To conclude, I’d love to see Facebook letting marketeers target specific sets of users who have reacted in a certain way. Perhaps, that is too much to ask for.
