Facebook Reactions: Advertisers want to say they are sad but they can't

Facebook Inc advertisers love the idea of using the social network's new anger, humor and other emoticon buttons to better target audiences, but they are :( that the company is not letting them do so right away.

The network, with 1.6 billion users, on Wednesday rolled out its new "Reactions" button, which expands the range of emotional responses far beyond the "thumbs up" known as "like." Facial expressions tagged "love," "haha," "sad," "angry" and "wow" now can be used to respond to a post.

But Facebook will not differentiate between the responses to determine a user's interests when it places ads and other posts in a customer's news feed. All reactions will be counted as additional likes, meaning Facebook will assume that the user wants to see more similar content, even if the person responded with an "anger" emoticon.

Facebook said it would decide later how new reactions should be weighted to personalize news feeds. But that is not soon enough for advertisers, who want to fine-tune their messages now.

"I think we should be able to use it for targeting," said Jonathan Adams, chief digital officer at New York-based Maxus Americas.

"If I am Hillary, I would be thrilled to target people who can't stand Trump right now," he said, referring to US Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and Republican candidate Donald Trump.

Corporations would be eager to study responses to determine whether chronic users of "sad" or "haha" buttons were more likely to buy different products, for instance, advertising executives said.

Advertisers said they hope Facebook would provide data showing the new range of reactions to posts and ads - to see whether an ad meant to be funny elicited 'haha', for instance - so they could tweak ads accordingly. Facebook distributes such information about 'likes' and has not said whether it would give out information on "reactions."

"There hasn't been much of an opportunity for people who are less vocal on social media to vocalize satisfaction," said Chris Gilbert, senior social strategist at digital agency Kettle.

Advertisers will eventually be able to use the reactions to target audiences, he said. "It's going to have a pretty big impact in understanding our work."

Virtual reality set to transform filmmaking

Chris Milk stepped onto a TED Conference stage and took the audience on an awe-inducing trip into the future of movies. While much of the early attention on virtual reality has focused on use of the immersive technology in video games, Milk and his US startup Vrse are using it to transform storytelling and filmgoing. "We have just started to scratch the surface of the true power of virtual reality," Milk said. "It's not a video game peripheral. It connects humans to other humans in a profound way... I think virtual reality has the potential to actually change the world." He had everyone in the Vancouver audience at TED , which ended Friday, hold Google Cardboard viewers to their eyes for what was billed as the world's collective virtual reality experience. Google Cardboard gear is literally that -- cardboard

Explained: Camera Improvements in the New HTC 10

With the HTC 10, the Taiwanese company is promising to undo the past wrongs in the cameras of its previous flagship phones. The camera has long a weak point in HTC devices. At first, HTC sacrificed image resolution in the M8 and made the size of individual pixels larger to capture more light (what HTC called Ultrapixel). But the resulting 4 megapixel images were often fuzzy, especially when cropped or enlarged. To fix the issue, in its next flagship - the M9 - HTC went with smaller individual pixels in a 20-megapixel camera last year, but it still underperformed in extreme situations, such as indoors and close-ups. In the HTC 10, the company attempts to strike a balance with larger individual pixels (1.55µm), but not as large as before and a 12 megapixel sensor in its camera coupled with a ƒ/1.8 lens. HTC accepts that in the imaging performance in the M9 was not up to the kind of spec of what they really like to see in a flagship. HTC is giving a slight boost to the selfi...

Freedom 251: 30,000 Units Sold, Components for Up to 2.5 Million Will Be Imported

Ringing Bells, the makers of the Rs. 251 smartphone - the Freedom 251 - confirmed to Gadgets 360 on Tuesday that it has still only accepted payments for 30,000 units of the phone. It also added that the components for these phones will be imported, and only assembled in India, not made here. Ringing Bells stopped accepting orders on February 19, and claims to have received over 70 million registrations. The company President and Director both repeatedly stated that the price of the phone would be made possible through economies of scale, and making the phone in India to cut out import costs. Economies of scale? However, in a discussion with Gadgets 360 the company revealed that it had only sold 30,000 units of the phone on day one. The company has now confirmed that it has not sent out the payment emails to anyone else who registered - "we were working out details of cash on delivery, which we are announcing now, so we will be sending emails to the first 2.5...

IntellectBeat

Search This Blog