Facebook Reactions Affect Your Reach

 

Facebook reactions went live just over a year ago, and the social giant has just revealed that these reaction emoji’s are about to be more influential than ‘Likes’ when it comes to determining what content appears on News Feeds.

The reactions, which include love, haha, wow, sad and angry now trumps the standard ‘Like’ when choosing what posts to display on users News Feeds.

Facebook states “Over the past year we've found that if people leave a Reaction on a post, it is an even stronger signal that they'd want to see that type of post than if they left a Like on the post, so we are updating News Feed to weigh reactions a little more than Likes when taking into account how relevant the story is to each person.”

In the future, this means that when you ‘Like’ a post it will still signal to Facebook that it is something you are interested in but if for instance you ‘Love’ something it sends an even stronger signal to Facebook.

This new update to Facebook’s News Feed means you may want to use a reaction button instead of ‘Like’ on types of content you want to see more of.

It’s worth noting that currently all Facebook reactions are weighed the same and they don’t influence the News Feed’s algorithm based on whether you love or hate the post.

Facebook also revealed that the ‘Love’ reaction is the most popular reaction by far; accounting for more than half of the 300 billion reactions posts have received since they went live.

Ultimately, the update to Facebook reactions serves as a good reminder that every action you take on Facebook can influences your News Feed in some way, and many believe that Facebook will use this data for advertising and other purposes.

Regardless of whether or not this is true, we do know that the reaction will impact your News Feed so it may be worth ignoring some posts in the future and possibly tweaking your News Feed settings to ensure nothing suspicious is happening.