In attempt to get y’all to finally chill on the whole ‘dislike’ button, Zuckerberg has finally decided to let you express yourself via a few emojis in addition to the conventional ‘like’.

‘Reactions’ rolled out globally last week, and already we’re seeing a people steer from ‘liking’ posts, to using the new range of emojis – love, haha, wow, sad and angry.

image via newsroom.fb.com

Having only just launched, brands are already worried about what this means for their company pages and whether their organic reach will be affected by another long overdue algorithm update.

The good news is that nothing has happened and your post reach won’t be affected (yet). The bad news is that there may be another algorithm change to factor into your social strategy soon.

Could ‘Reactions’ be factored into Facebook’s News Feed algorithm?

When Reactions launched on Wednesday, Facebook published the following statement:

“Reactions will have the same impact on ad delivery as likes. We will spend time learning from this rollout and use feedback to improve.” 

“Over time we hope to learn how the different Reactions should be weighted differently by News Feed to do a better job of showing everyone the stories they most want to see.”

Just like the announcement to News Feed earlier this month on using qualitative feedback to show relevant stories, the majority of pages should not be affected if people are engaging with your content and find it relevant.

Facebook has admitted this feature is in its infancy and they are gathering data before rolling out any changes to their algorithm. Late last year, Facebook’s Director of Monetization and Product Marketing said in an interview to AdAge:

“Over time we do expect to have a better understanding of how these different reactions impact what people want to see in their news feed. So it’s very possible that loves or hahas may be treated differently. We’re going to learn this as we’re going through testing.”

Facebook has been known to experiment with displaying varying emotional content to users in the past, so it’s possible News Feed could eventually tailor a mix of posts to you that balance the number of happy and sad things you see when you check in.

We think ‘Reactions’ definitely has the opportunity to build upon more detailed user profiles that could lead to better targeting, but it’s early days yet.

The Moral of the Story

If you have good content, you have nothing to worry about.

If you stick to the fundamentals of good content, and people are “reacting” (aka bothering enough about your content to tell you how they feel about it) and engaging with what you have to say, then you’re already ahead.