Man Unsure If Too Soon To Use Facebook Love Reaction

Facebook users worldwide are enthralled with the new Reactions the company recently unveiled. Instead of being shackled with just the option to “like” a post, users can now Love, Sad, Angry, Wow, or HaHa various user posts.

We asked Facebook for comment and got the following reply:

These new reactions are a huge step forward for the universe. We feel this change will enable mankind to truly share their passions and make personal connections with each other. While other companies have their sights set on reaching Mars, curing disease, and making everyday tasks like driving safer we’re proud to focus on having a true impact on humanity by allowing our users to reflect their true emotions about memes.

The new options haven’t been much “wow” for everybody though.

In fact, we caught up with one user who could use a perplexed reaction on his own Facebook page.

SEO guru Joshua Makowski woke up this morning not knowing he’d face one of the hardest decisions of his life.

“I want to use the Love reaction, but I’m not sure if it’s too soon. How do I know?” said Josh, while contemplating how to react to his friend Katherine’s recent status update – a bathroom mirror selfie of her new (almost un-noticeably different) haircut.

“We’ve been seeing each other for a couple of months now, and I stayed the night at her place last weekend. I really think she might be the one, but I don’t know how she’ll react if I take our relationship to the next level by clicking ‘Love’ instead of ‘Like.’ This isn’t just something that can be thrown around lightly,” Josh says, “It’s a new haircut. Sure I have no idea what’s different, I just know that if I don’t properly respond I might not be staying the night this weekend; and I can’t afford for this relationship to end – I left my phone charger in her car.”

Josh isn’t the only one attempting to figure out how the new reactions fit into his life.

Social media agencies are working hard on differentiating the brand awareness value between likes and wows – creating several new metrics in the process. We caught up with Karen Johnson – junior deputy assistant to the regional vice president social media director at a well known agency. The 19 year old Guru told us the following:

We’re still gathering data, but so far our correlation studies have found that a ‘Love’ is 1.053 times more influential than a ‘Like’ – with ‘Wow’ topping that at 1.337 likes.

We also can’t wait to start re-targeting users and serving them dynamic ads based on the emotions with which they responded to our posts. For example, our ‘Happy Presidents Day, Buy a Mattress’ Facebook post got 7 wows, 14 haha, 3 sads, and 24 angry responses.

Now, we can segment those people when we bombard them with mattress ads for the next 6 months – but only once we fully understand the difference between haha and wow and how it applies to our clients storytelling approach.

The struggle is real. Several people we interviewed were left not knowing how to react to various posts.

“My sister posted a video of her son falling down while trying to walk,” says one reader named Steve who asked us not to mention his name, “I laughed, but I’m not sure if I should use ‘haha’ or ‘wow’ or ‘sad?’ It seems too basic to me to just use ‘like’ when I have all these other options now. I mean…it’s funny to me, but probably not to her, and definitely not her 1 year old – but I didn’t approve his Facebook friend request. Will he see that I laughed?”

These new Facebook changes usher in a plethora of new social media ethics issues that are just begging to be solved.

• How soon is too soon to use the “Love” reaction?
• Should we respond to Pro-Trump posts with “haha” or “angry” or “sad?”
• Is the “sad” associated with the post, or the person who posted it?

We asked Dingy – our resident digital prophet for his reactions insights and a strategy for using them, and he sent back the following:

????❤️???????????⚡️???

We have no idea what Dingy’s strategy means, but we’re told that it has already won an Effie, 2 Marcoms, and is shortlisted for 4 categories at this years Caanes Lions.

Stay tuned for next week’s correlation study on how the ratio of likes to loves and wows to sads affects Google’s ranking of your site.