Starting today, Facebook users can do more than simply “like” a post with a thumbs up.
The social media giant has rolled out animated “Wow,” “Haha,” “Sad,” “Angry” and “Love” buttons that you can use to express an emotion on your friends’ posts. The "Like" option, which has become synonymous with Facebook, will still be there.
Facebook said it felt the need to allow users to be able to respond to events in other ways.
"About a year ago, Mark [Zuckerberg] gathered a bunch of folks in a room and was like, guys, it's time for us to take the feedback that we've been hearing from users for years around wanting the way that you react to posts to be a little bit more expressive than just the Like button," according to Julie Zhuo, director of product design for Facebook, in a statement to NBC News.
"We knew that it was going to be a pretty large endeavor, it's a pretty big change, the Like button gets pressed a billion times a day," she added.
The social network says that for more than a year, it looked at emojis (icons) people were already using to react to posts as well as comments to get a sense of the emotions users were trying to convey. Facebook also tested the change on users in Ireland and Spain last October.
About 1.6 billion people around the world use Facebook.
