How the new Facebook like buttons: love, haha, wow, sad and angry affect your Power Query reports

Few days ago Facebook introduced 5 new response buttons to enrich our engagement options. Clicking the “like” button is no longer the only option on Facebook, your fans can now respond with “love”, “haha”, “wow”, “sad” and “angry” reactions to your company’s posts.

If you analyze your brand on Facebook, you are probably wondering now how to measure the new reactions. Wouldn’t it be awesome if we could add the different reactions to our reports, and compare positive / negative  reactions?

For those of you who analyze fan engagement using Facebook Graph API, and use Excel, Power Query or Power BI to import the number of likes from your page posts, please continue reading to understand how you are affected. Because you are (to give you a hint – here we could use a sad or angry Facebook button to reflect the current situation).

First of all, the implications are not specific to Excel/Power Query/Power BI. Any analytical tool that uses Facebook REST API is affected.

Second, Facebook plans to include the new response types in their Graph API, but till they do, we cannot get any insights on how many users were sad or angry (or clicked any of the new buttons). Now I miss Disappointed button.

Third, and this is a bit surprising, Facebook confirmed here that they have a bug in the way “Like” clicks are counted. You would expect that till the different reaction types are separately measured, you would continue to get a count of all the clicks (like, and all the new reactions), but currently Facebook ignore the new reactions.

The implication of this bug could seriously  affect your reports. Expect to see a drastic decline in the number of likes, as users will click other positive reactions that will not be counted.

I promise to write a followup on this issue when things are fixed or improved.

Till then, if you missed it, you can read my previous Facebook posts here.

Please go to my Facebook page here, to love one of my posts, or just say haha, wow, be sad or be angry. I promise I will not see it on my dashboards 🙂