Gone are the days when you post something on your Facebook page and you plunge in to see the number of likes the post has garnered. Today Facebook reactions are taking social marketers by storm who are striving to extract as many user insights as possible. The best part of going social is the ability to interact and measure performance. And with Facebook reactions, your social performance has become measurable in a new way. So you can now quench your thirst for more detailed data-driven insights from emotions expressed by love, wow, sad, angry, and laughing icons on Facebook.

While the good news is better performance measurement, the bad news is that the measurement strategy for Facebook reactions isn't as simple as measuring like and shares. Using reactions need the addition of some measurement overtone for understanding content performance. In addition to more measurement choices, marketers also have to embrace a new measurement concept: intent.

Emotional Target

The measurement of Facebook reactions can be confusing and challenging at times. Depending on the kind of post, reactions can have different interpretations. Each reaction has a different meaning in different kinds of posts. The challenge is to build a measurement plan that uses these metrics in a productive manner.

But you can address this by asking yourself one simple question- what is my emotional target for this post? Put simply, you want to know what emotions you are trying to evoke in people through this post. You will want a number of wows and loves if its a product announcement post, but you will want a number of “hahas” if its a comical post. Similarly, announcing the demise of a celebrity would ideally elicit more sad reactions and unfavorable political news would elicit angry reactions, both reactions considered positive, given the context of the post. 

Collating your emotional target before posting on Facebook allows you to make proper sense of audience's reactions, and monitor the performance of the post. 

Why are Facebook reactions good?

Though Facebook reactions are challenging to measure, they are good. They may not help you with your ROI or give some groundbreaking audience insight, but they give enough opportunities to users for engaging with your uniquely. Reactions are a thoughtful way of interacting on social media, allowing users to express their opinions in a new way by simply attaching an emotional element to it.

Although marketers have been debating continually over the usefulness of Facebook reactions, some degree of optimism is seen in them. Though reactions can start engagements, they are not engagements intrinsically. Many marketers feel that reactions can divert attention of marketers from real social performance metrics. Although the measurement of Facebook reactions means another page of analysis in social media reports, but it certainly is paving the way for more humanized engagement. 

Bottom line

Since influencing users by evoking emotions is all marketers need to do, Facebook reactions provide insights into what needs to be done to evoke that particular emotion in users through better content