Meet Reactions, Facebook’s solution to the ‘like’ conundrum

This has been a long time coming. Facebook on Wednesday announced a new product aimed at resolving the strange phenomenon whereby people end up liking a sad status.

Called Reactions, the new solution allows you to respond to a status with a variety of, well, reactions. To add a reaction, hold down the like button on mobile or hover over the like button on desktop to see the reaction image options, and then tap either Like, Love, Haha, Wow, Sad, or Angry.

It’s an interesting move, but unlike some of Facebook’s previous updates, is likely to be welcomed by most users.

“We understand that this is a big change, and want to be thoughtful about rolling this out,” says Facebook Product Manager Sammi Krug, Product Manager. “For more than a year we have been conducting international research including focus groups and surveys to determine what types of reactions people would want to use most. We also looked at how people are already commenting on posts and the top stickers and emoticons as signals for the types of reactions people are already using to determine which reactions to offer”.

According to Krug, Facebook has been testing Reactions in a few markets since last year, and has “received positive feedback so far”. Today, we’re excited to offer it to everyone who uses Facebook around the world. We will continue learning and listening to feedback to make sure we have a set of reactions that will be useful all over the world. We hope you enjoy the new Reactions!