Tapping the Emotional: How to Use Facebook’s Reactions to Get More Engagement

Your Facebook news feed just got a lot more expressive.

After a year of testing various options, Facebook released their new “Like” button. For the first time, Facebook users can react to a status with more than a thumbs up. The new Reactions button enables users to express themselves with five additional emojis, besides the conventional “like.”

The options include: “love,” “angry,” “sad,” “haha,” and “wow.”

The change is huge, and it enables users to express emotions like compassion towards posts where the traditional “Like” would be inappropriate. But, more than that, the new feature opens a whole array of possibilities for different businesses, whether they are dentists, plumbers, or general contractors. This development is especially important for small businesses since it changes entirely the way audiences are analyzed. If until now you didn’t have a way to get a pretty clear picture of the people that you are targeting on Facebook, thanks to these “emotions” you can now dig even deeper and find out more things about your viewership. For instance, the fact that you can see how people react to a certain post can help you adjust your online marketing strategy accordingly.

With Reactions being implemented on both personal and businesses pages, this feels like the perfect opportunity to dive into this new feature and analyze how small and local business owners can use Facebook Reactions to get more engagement.

How Do Reactions Impact Your Business?

The Facebook management has declared that these reactions will be treated as the old “Like” button, in the beginning, so you can assume that your follower will get the same type of content in their news feed, whether they hit “love” or “angry.” For the future, however, they predict a more nuanced approach, to truly show people what they like in the news feed.

It is true that the way in which they plan to perfect the news feed is a bit unclear since someone hitting “sad” to a post of their friend and hitting “sad” for an ad that you might have posted could mean different things.

However, the benefits of Reactions for you business are already visible and in your favor. For instance, if someone presses “sad” to a certain announcement that you posted, then you have the ability to contact them in private and ask them what seems to be the problem and whether you can be of any use.

Even more, you can better target your audience. Say you posted an ad to which some people reacted in a negative way. Next time you can optimize your ads more efficiently and exclude users that had an adverse reaction.

What Exactly Do They Mean to Your Business?

Firstly, it allows people to react properly to your business without having to comment. Since comments have been the primary way of understanding the needs and emotions of users, a whole new land of possibilities has opened for people – and people love having options.

As stated before, local business owners now have the possibility of getting more accurate signals from users regarding their brand and also a better view of Facebook insights.

Even more, you must admit that the only options a user had towards reaction to your content were to comment on it, ignore it, share it and like it. Now it is far easier to understand the emotions of your fans and use them to reach out to them more effectively.

A New Approach

Another trend has appeared since Reactions were introduced, and it might be one that even small business owners can use in their digital marketing campaign. More and more companies have started incorporating these Reactions into their ads as a call to action.

However, it should be obvious that you shouldn’t abuse this option, but let people react in a natural way. Also, you shouldn’t be afraid of the negative reactions that you might receive, since as you might have noticed, people who had something bad to express already did it by posting a comment.

Facebook has made it quite clear that it wishes to improve their news feed algorithm and Reactions will play a role in this as soon as they get all their data and tests right.

How Should You Feel About This?

For starters, your business will probably benefit from the change.

Why?

Well, now Facebook is far more engaging and the chance of people investing more time into your content has grown considerably. More time spent on your content equals more chances of fans turning into leads and buyers.

Also, it is obvious that the people who didn’t like a post before and chose to ignore it instead now have the opportunity to express their exact feelings. And as you know by now, even hitting the angry face will count as engagement.

More than that, since there is always a percentage of people that are not compelled to either like or dislike your content but rather remain passive, with the new option of selecting a Reaction they might be tempted to snap out of their state and engage as well.

The only thing that might be a bit frustrating to small businesses would be the users who react with “angry” or sad” without leaving a comment, because they only express a feeling without actually detailing what they’re unhappy about and thus, they won’t get the chance to fix certain things if needed. However, this shouldn’t discourage you, but instead, it should raise a small alarm sign and put you on the path of making certain inquiries to discover potential issues.

Small business owners shouldn’t be discouraged by the use of negative reactions since they are sometimes not meant as criticism. For instance, if you post a sad story to raise awareness regarding a certain cause, many may react with “sad” not because they did not like your story, but because they felt saddened by it.

Overall, the new Facebook Reactions can be used in many ways to help you boost engagement and become more visible as a local business.

Have the results started to show already? Share your story with us.