By Erin Carson, TechRepublic, Excerpt

Facebook is giving users new ways to react to posts. Here’s what social marketers should keep in mind, and how brands are already adapting.

Word first came a few months back that Facebook would introduce reaction buttons in the form of emoji, to give users the chance to express a range of emotions apart from like.

The new reaction buttons Facebook rolled out last week include “haha,” “wow,” angry,” “love,” and “sad.” To use one of them, a user hover over or hold down (on mobile) the like button to pull up the list of animated emoji.

For Facebook users, this means there’s a slightly more nuanced way to react to posts while still barely exerting the minimum effort involved with hitting a button.

For marketers, Facebook Reaction buttons might just be another vanity metric poised to distract from real engagement.

“What these Facebook Reactions are going to do is diversify the vanity metrics system, and it’s going to facilitate a new type of marketing approach that’s going to then try to trigger different types of reaction,” said Altimeter analyst Brian Solis. The problem, though, is that while likes or wows can activate an engagement, they aren’t engagements themselves.

Solis has a bit of optimism for Facebook Reaction buttons, as long as marketers can use them to design for what he called the art of engagement, art being actions, reactions, and transactions. The wow isn’t the end goal, but a moment leading to it.

“I like to think about these reactions as humanizing this engagement where I have your attention, you have my attention, and now we do something with that, so it’s almost like marketing has an opportunity to convert impressions to expressions,” he said.