Facebook to add new temporary reaction for Mother’s Day

6 May 2016

Facebook is to begin testing temporary reactions that are time-sensitive, with the first coming on 8 May, ahead of Mother’s Day in the US, in the form of a flower.

Global Facebook users are still getting used to the addition of reactions to posts, which were first trialled in Ireland and elsewhere back in October of last year, but now the social network wants to expand from just a set range of emojis.

Prior to its official statement on its expansion of reactions, a social media manager called Sreedev Sharma, who obviously considers himself a bit of a code sleuth, discovered within the Facebook page source that a ‘thankful’ flower emoji was on its way, while the ‘yay’ and ‘confused’ emojis will be gotten rid of.

Who’s actually using reactions?

The reactions were brought in by Facebook under the pretence that the social network felt that it was too limiting to only be able to react to posts with a ‘like’, especially given that some posts might not necessarily be good news.

In a brief statement, Facebook said: “To celebrate Mother’s Day, we are testing the ability for people in a few markets to leave a flower reaction.”

In this instance, Facebook will make the flower reaction available for Mother’s Day in the US, but could roll it out to other countries as more of a permanent feature, but this is still speculation.

Whether anyone uses these new temporary reactions is anyone’s guess, however, a recent study into how reactions are being used since their global launch shows that most of us aren’t really that bothered with them.

According to its findings, only 2.4pc of reactions on 130,000 posts have not been the ‘like’ thumbs up, but of that 2.4pc, just over half of them have been the ‘love’ reaction.

Bouquet of flowers image via Shutterstock

Colm Gorey was a senior journalist with Silicon Republic

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