Facebook will soon roll out a wider range of reactions to posted items than "like."
Soon its users will be able to be "angry" and "sad," or shout "yay" or "wow" -- or simply "love" a comment, photo or video posted on the social media site.
"We want people to be able to share all of the things that are meaningful to them, not just the things that are happy and that people are going to like when they see it," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Wednesday. He said the rollout will come "pretty soon."
Facebook began testing the new expressions, which it calls Reactions, last October in Chile, the Philippines, Portugal, Ireland, Spain, Japan and Colombia.
The social media giant is hoping the additional choices will encourage people to share their thoughts more frequently and spend even longer periods on the social network than they already do.
Profits
Also Wednesday, Facebook reported a profit of $1.56 billion in the final three months of 2015, compared with $701 million in the same period a year earlier.
Revenue in the quarter that ended December 31 also rose, to $5.84 billion from $3.85 billion during the same period a year earlier.
Facebook's growth was fueled by its online advertising growth, which targeted its hefty number of mobile users. Facebook said it has nearly 1.6 billion users, and of those, 1.4 billion use the service on mobile devices.
“If you’re an advertiser and you want to reach mass scale, you only have two options: Facebook and Google,” James Cakmak, an analyst at Monness Crespi Hardt & Co., told Bloomberg Business News. “Facebook remains the fastest-growing platform for advertiser spending, and as they open up new channels for users, that won’t change.”
Some material for this report came from AFP and Reuters.
