Dive Brief:
- According to May research by quintly, Facebook users aren’t taking advantage of the full set of "reactions" buttons it rolled out earlier this year. In fact, 97% are still just clicking on the iconic thumbs up "like" button.
- The research looked at 130,000 Facebook posts on pages with a large number of followers such as brands, celebrities, politicians and sports teams.
- The new reactions emojis include "love," "ha ha," "wow," "sad" and "angry." Quintly’s research found that within the 3% of clicks on icons other than "like," more than half were on the “love” icon which is essentially an extension of like. Less than 1% of reactions clicks were on negative emotions.
Dive Insight:
Reactions were Facebook’s answer for users wanting a “dislike” button, or something beyond the like button to express other emotions, such as empathy or sadness.
Marketers cheered the additional icons with the thinking being that having a larger set of emotions to tap into when engaging with content would provide deeper insight into what an audience was thinking. Insights like that could be valuable in determining how different content and messaging resonates with people.
When those engagement clicks were limited to “like,” marketers were largely in the dark on what people really felt beyond the fact they were interested enough to engage with a click. The hope with the reactions icon set is they would provide a much more valuable sentiment metric that could be tracked.
As quintly’s research points out, marketers are still largely in the dark on sentiment. Since almost all engagements are still through likes rather than one of the other reactions, the buttons aren't yet making it easier for brands to see how consumers really feel about a given post.