Recently Facebook began rolling out their Reactions features on a global scale. For those unfamiliar, basically instead of just providing Likes, Reactions will allow users to express anger, sadness, surprise, and more, thus allowing users to show the appropriate emotion for certain posts. Gone are the days when you had to “Like” a sad post just to acknowledge it.
At the same time we suppose this would be ideal for advertisers. After all if you show anger towards a product, it could be taken as a sign that you don’t like it. However it seems that for now, Facebook will not be letting advertisers use these new Reactions as a way to create targeted ads. For now, Reactions will only be counted towards additional likes, meaning that it an “angry” reaction would be treated the same as a “wow” one.
Unsurprisingly some advertisers aren’t too thrilled about these limitations. According to Jonathan Adams, chief digital officer at Maxus Americas, “I think we should be able to use it for targeting. If I am Hillary, I would be thrilled to target people who can’t stand Trump right now.” Facebook has since stated that they plan to decide later on how Reactions will be used to personalize News Feeds.
We suppose in a way this might be good for users who are concerned about their privacy. After all knowing what you search for is very different from knowing a specific emotion you feel about a certain brand, person, company, and etc.
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