October 9, 2015 UPDATE: Facebook has started testing the new feature, Facebook Reactions.
“Reactions gives you new ways to express love, awe, humor and sadness. It’s not a dislike button, but it does give you the power to easily express sorrow and empathy — in addition to delight and warmth.”
-Mark Zuckerberg
Read on for the original post where we sort of got it right.
Original post:
For as long as there has been Facebook, there has been a subset of the Facebook audience clamoring for a dislike button to accompany the like button. In fact, right now, more than 30,000 users currently use a browser extension that adds in the dislike functionality. The internet has been buzzing over the last week because Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook is working on integrating that exact feature into Facebook.
Except he didn’t.
In a Q&A on September 15, 2015, Zuckerberg clarified his vision for the new Facebook functionality to be something very different than a dislike button:
“We didn’t want to build just a dislike button, because we don’t want to turn Facebook into a forum where people are voting up or down on people’s posts… Over the years of people asking for this, what we’ve come to understand is that people aren’t looking for the ability to downvote other people’s posts, what they really want is to be able to express empathy… I do think that it is important to give people more options than just ‘like’ as a quick way to emote and share their feelings on a post.”
Facebook is looking to expand the language of the platform beyond the “Like” as users begin to expect more nuanced feedback than just a thumbs up. Sure, comments partially fill this role, but giving people additional feedback mechanisms could quickly change the language of Facebook just as emoji have changed the way we text. It’s also going to be a more helpful form of feedback for brands.
To get a hint of what the new functionality will look like, I looked back to the last time that Facebook incorporated emotions in to the platform. In 2013, Facebook added the ability to incorporate emotions in status updates. The functionality is still there:
When we see the new response functionality roll out, I assume it’s going to be a simplified version of this framework. I’d guess a textual algorithm will analyze the copy in a status update and offer a few options via a dropdown of emotions. Friends and fans can then easily add emotional responses to every post (paired with the appropriate emoji, obviously).
But do I think you’ll ever be able to click a simple dislike button on Facebook? Nope.
For a few more thoughts on this, check out the following video from our Worldcom partners:
The post Facebook’s New Button Isn’t “Dislike” appeared first on LinhartPR.
