Facebook exposes Page posts’ Reaction counts through new API

Brands are about to get a much better idea of how people feel about feel about their Facebook posts and who those people are.

In late February, Facebook officially rolled out a set of emojis called Reactions so that people could be more specific than the “like” button allows about how a post made them feel. Problem was, if brands wanted to keep track of how many people clicked “haha” or “wow” on a post, they had to do so manually or use Facebook’s own Page Insights analytics tool. Otherwise, Facebook grouped the five new Reactions together with “likes” when brands checked out the data using a third-party measurement dashboard.

Now, Facebook is ready to expose specific counts for every type of Reaction on posts when brands access the data through a third-party dashboard. On Tuesday, during its F8 developer conference, Facebook introduced a Reactions API that would let those dashboards request the Reactions-specific data.

Brands that use these third-party tools to monitor their Pages’ performance will be able to see the names and Facebook account IDs of each person who reacted to a given post, as well as which Reaction they used. That means that brands can not only measure the total number of each individual Reaction for a given post, but also gather data about the people who reacted — which probably isn’t a good idea — in order to augment what they may already know about those people.