Do you know how your consumers feel? We’re not asking just what they think about the quality of your product, nor how it’s changed the way they live, nor the way they use it; but how they actually feel, deep down inside.

You may have noticed a few chances to your “Like” options while scrolling through your Facebook News Feed last week. After 6 months of testing, the platform finally rolled out its emoji post reactions feature.

Now users can react to a post with 6 emotions: Like, Love, Haha, Wow, Sad & Angry. While it’s easy to assume that Facebook is granting us a greater range of expressible emotions, here at Drive we know the truth: Facebook wants your emotional data.

So what does this mean for anyone advertising on the platform? Well, it’s time to aim for love, sadness, or humor.

Good advertising taps into the consumer’s emotions. If your ads don’t seek to consume your perspective customers with happiness, sadness, or even anger – while simultaneously telling your brand’s story – then, it’s failing to do its job.

Think of Facebook’s emoji reactions as a glimpse into the emotional psyche of your consumer. No longer do “like counts” determine the success of your advertisement. Now it matters if your ad made consumers angry, if they laughed or cried. Now, with just the click of a button, you know the greater emotional impact of ads on your consumers.

Why is this important? Because if you’re using social to tell your brand’s story, you want to make an emotional impact. Branding that does nothing besides elicit automaton liking, is a thing of the past.

At this point, Facebook says they are just testing to see how people use the emojis and that it will not affect the News Feed algorithm. But, knowing Facebook, you can bet in the future your emotions will be used to curate your content. (SOURCE)

Facebook is a data machine. Any information placed in your profile, the users with whom you choose to interact, the articles you post, the information you share, Facebook uses this data to drive what appears on your News Feed. Essentially, everything you see on Facebook has been specifically curated for you, including advertisements. In the future, your emotions will also dictate what you see on Facebook.

While we can’t currently use consumers’ emotions for ad targeting, we can at least show respect to their feelings by paying attention to how our advertisements affect them.