Facebook 'Reaction' buttons hardly used: study

Facebook's 'Reaction' buttons, which the social networking site introduced earlier this year, have failed to engage users as much as anticipated, a new study has found.
Since the end of February this year, Facebook users have the possibility to express their feelings in five other ways than just with a 'Like'.
Researchers at Quintly, a US-based company, analysed 130,000 posts to know how Facebook users interacted after the official launch of the 'Reaction' buttons.
They found that on an average Facebook Reactions have low significance.
Taking a look at the share of interactions, researchers found that 97 per cent were likes, comments and shares.

"In this first step of our Facebook Reactions analysis it is clear that Facebook Reactions are not used very frequently by the average at this point," the researchers said.

"In our study, we also broke this share further down and looked at this split excluding shares and comments, which also revealed similar findings," they said.
Researchers found that among the new reaction options "Love" is predominantly used, even though users knew positive reactions already since the launch of Facebook through the Like button.
The study shows that videos obtain up to 40 per cent more Reactions than image posts, the 'Tech Times' reported.

Users tend to use the "wow" reaction much more when dealing with videos instead of static pictures or GIFs (Graphics Interchange Format).
The "angry" reaction was used twice as much with video content, when pitted against image content.
One conclusion of the study was that most users had a positive feedback towards reactions.
Before Facebook implemented Reactions, it was difficult for users to quickly express a negative reaction.
Via the "angry" or "sad" reactions it is now possible to do so, but the number of users that take advantage of the two possibilities is low.
This comes to show that Facebook users are more likely to interact with content that is entertaining, funny or positive, researchers said.