Facebook to Introduce Reactions for Reels

Reactions, reactions everywhere. First Facebook enabled them for posts in your feed, then for messages in Messenger. Now it works on introducing reaction in Reels, so you can react to a short video without wasting too many words. It hasn’t been announced yet, though, so we don’t know when and how.

The first information about the upcoming feature came from the famous app explorer Alessandro Paluzzi who allegedly found the traces of it in the beta version of the Facebook app for Android. There was no mention of where he found it in the original tweet, though, but his discoveries are usually based on his reverse engineering of alpha and beta versions of popular apps.

Reactions for Reels would be a logical extension of implementing reactions to any content that users can react to in any form. The set of reactions we see in the picture by Alessandro Paluzzi (the genesis of which is not certain) mirrors the traditional set by Facebook: like, love, care, laugh, wow, sad, and angry.

Though Reels is one of the first Meta projects that are available on both Facebook and Instagram, it functions differently on these platforms. The Instagram version of Reels will not receive reactions, as they are not present on Instagram at all. Another Meta initiative that spreads across its projects is messaging across them all. And while on Messenger one can use reactions, they will not appear if this message was sent from Instagram.

It's not clear yet when these reactions will be available to even a small group of Facebook users. No official announcements have been made. Probably the feature will require a certain period for testing.

Will you use these reactions on Reels when they are active? Do you often watch Reels? Will you think reactions will provide better involvement by the audience? Though our comments don’t have reactions yet, here you can tell us what you think!