Today, Facebook unveiled its “upgrade” to the like button – six emoticons with which one can express emotion towards a post. And of course, the first question I got was this afternoon was: How do you measure them?
And, like most things in measurement, it doesn’t require a new tool or a new anything, since the six emoticons map perfectly to six of the “27 types of conversations” we defined back in 2008. Back then, we were being overwhelmed with the unstructured data world of social media content and needed some way to classify the conversations in a way that would be meaningful to our clients. Peter Kowalski, our chief of research at the time, developed the following mutually exclusive list of conversation types:
- Acknowledging receipt of information
- Advertising something
- Answering a question
- Asking a question
- Augmenting a previous post
- Calling for action
- Disclosing personal information
- Distributing media
- Expressing agreement
- Expressing criticism
- Expressing support
- Expressing surprise
- Giving a heads up
- Responding to criticism
- Giving a shout out
- Making a joke
- Making a suggestion
- Making an observation
- Offering a greeting
- Offering an opinion
- Putting out a wanted ad
- Rallying support
- Recruiting people
- Showing dismay
- Soliciting comments
- Soliciting help
- Starting a poll
We are deeply grateful that Facebook didn’t implement 27 different choices of emoticons on every post.
Nonetheless, these six new Facebook reactions do match to six of the 27 types of conversations. Let’s go through each emoticon one-by-one:
Angry = #10 Expressing criticism
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Sad = #24 Showing dismay
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Wow= #12 Expressing surprise
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Haha = #16 Making a joke
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Love = #11 Expressing support
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Like = #9 Expressing agreement
So if you’re struggling with measuring these new Facebook reactions or emojis in general, start with the classifications outlined in this blog post, and then follow the 6 basic steps of social media measurement.
