All about Facebook’s expressive emojis

Design | Data | Emotional Intelligence

Ambreesh Arya
UX Collective
Published in
5 min readMay 3, 2020

EEver since worldwide lockdown and restriction on travel have been imposed, platforms like #Facebook, #Instagram, #Zoom, #GoogleDuo, & #Whatsapp have become more important than ever to connect with your loved ones (apart from the source of memes and entertainment :D)

In the article “Impact of the Coronavirus Pandemic on Global Social Media Usage, It mentioned that the time spent on the social media app increased by over 61%-65% globally.

As users are spending a lot of time browsing the different digital content throughout the day. At the same time, companies are busy finding solutions for the user’s requirements.

“COVID-19 forced companies to rethink their product offerings.”

In order to empathize with users, companies like Whatsapp and Google Duo have increased its group video calling limits. But to achieve that, companies are paying very high costs — the cost of resources (human & tech), security, & space.

Facebook, the most popular social media platform has also seen an extreme spike in global usage due to COVID-19 pandemic. However, increased traffic was not translating into good business.

To solve this problem, Facebook has come with the most cost-efficient and smart product- “Care” an emoji; a new kind of contextual content filter.

Why a new emoji?

As daily routines changed overnight, motivation for using social media also changed- Facebook has realized this very quickly.

https://www.digitalinformationworld.com/2019/01/the-most-important-insights-on-the-world-of-social-media.html

As you can see in the above-mentioned report; Top motivation among 16–24 age group are:

To fill up spare time (46%).

To find funny or entertaining content (46%)

To stay in touch with what my friends are doing (42%)

Facebook has given an extra emoji (a contextual content filter) to react on the content, as most of the people are sharing motivational quotes, quarantine stories (e.g. Online meetings/classes, learning new things, spending time with parents or kids), COVID news, and last but not the least- memes.

How an emoji can solve a business problem?

The foundation was laid in Feb 2009; when Facebook introduced the reaction emojis to the world- Like, Love, Haha, Wow, Sad, & Angry. These were nothing but contextual content filters for Facebook. With the help of the user’s reaction on a particular content, they will filter out similar kinds of users/content based on the checklist (Gender, Age, Location, Interests, Language, etc.) and create a training data set for its ads communication engine.

Facebook is using the concept of Emotional Intelligence to create an effective and robust communication engine for ads business. #BigData & #MachineLearning is the backbone of that project.

What is emotional intelligence?

Daniel Goleman Psychologist/Author, has explained in his book Emotional Intelligence:-

Emotional Intelligence refers to how well we handle ourselves & our relationships: the four domains; self-awareness, self-management, empathy, social skills.

Let’s put this Emotional Intelligence in the context of business:

Customer-awareness: How well we know our customers?

Data-management: How well we process our data?

Empathy: How well we know what our customers are feeling?

Social Skill: How well we are connected with our customers?

The movement pandemic was announced, private messaging and video calling are the two segments that have witnessed an upsurge in usage. These are services that Facebook does not generate any revenue. As a result, Facebook’s ads business was suffering and it was struggling to maintain its communication engine up and running.

Last month April 2020, Facebook releases any other contextual content filter — “Care”- an emoji.

As a result, Facebook will cut short the processing time and redirect the right kind of content (ads content) to the end-user.

How does it work?

If you read Facebook’s data policy document, you will find out that Facebook collects the content, communications, and other information you provide when you use Facebook, including when you sign up for an account, create or share content and message or communicate with others. This can include information in or about the content that you provide (e.g. metadata), such as the location of a photo or the date a file was created.

Apart from these, Facebook also collects information about how you use Facebook, such as

the types of content that you view or engage with, the features you use, the actions/reaction you take.

Let’s understand the other side (Facebook for Business) of the story. Today’s date, every business has an online presence. They share some information with Facebook whenever the user uses their website/app and vice versa.

Case Study

To explain this, I have created a sample USER PERSONA.

Impact

Global Web Index shows that younger age groups are particularly keen on researching products online via social networks.

Conclusion: In this fast pacing digital world, Designers and Product Thinkers have to be very creative and adaptive when it comes to solving the real problem. Even a small design change can create a huge impact on the product and business.

This was all about this article: Design | Data | Emotional Intelligence

Thanks for reading.

Published in UX Collective

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