The Business Side of Facebook Reactions

Have you seen or read something that put a smile on your face today? How about something that put a smile on your Facebook?

The new Facebook Reactions feature gives users access to animated emoticons to express themselves with love, laughter, sadness, anger and surprise. After all, not every post is likeable, right?

So why is so much emotion suddenly at your fingertips? Well, according to Wired.com, in December of 2015, 1.44 billion people accessed Facebook on a mobile device. Of the people who accessed it on both a monthly and daily basis, 90% of them did so via a mobile device. Since writing comments on a smart phone isn’t always easy, Facebook users kept requesting a quick, easy and gesture-based way to give instant feedback and Mark Zuckerberg finally conceded.

Smiling and angry faces are being embraced on your personal Facebook page, but what about your business page? The goal of posting content here is to promote your brand, engage with your consumer, and create
a conversation that leads to viral opportunities. In our professional opinion, a passive emoticon offers little opportunity to do any of the above.

Here’s an example:
Wells Fargo recently posted an online banking outage that was causing disruption for their customers. How did the customers respond on Facebook?
– 4% reported sadness
– 93% reported they liked the post
– Less than1% reported anger

What did the emoticons tells us about their consumers? Is it possible less than 1% were actually angered by the disruption?

– There were 33 comments, creating opportunities for Wells Fargo to directly engage with their customers
– 22 people shared the information

Both negative and positive comments were expressed, but Wells Fargo responded and kept active while problem solving the heart of the issue.

Our best recommendations:
1) Write your messages in a way that will elicit a response and/or engagement, rather than a simple emoticon reaction.
2) Communicating with your customer in a way that solicits a response is better for your brand (positive or negative feedback) than an emoji response.

3) Don’t rely on the emoticon to tell you if your consumers are upset. If a post receives a lot of “anger” responses, be prepared with follow-up messaging.

4) Emoticons are not a means of measuring consumer satisfaction. Analytical analysis should continue to be based on engagement.

5) Regardless of your message, don’t be surprised if the main response continues to be a lot of “likes.”

Until further ado, we leave this with you: Emoticons are best used within the personal page experience. ?

Published on: March 24, 2016