Express Yourself With The New Facebook Emoticons

After a long day of work, I often do a quick browse of my Facebook friends to see what they’re up to. Nothing ends a hard day of work like a beer, and what better place than Facebook to find out what bars my friends are at?

The other day, I had just clocked over twelve hours in the shop, and I went to post a status update to see if anyone wanted to go throw one back with me — and out of nowhere, a new emoticon option popped up!

It seems that Facebook has selected my profile as a candidate to test this new feature. Of course the first thing I did was spam everyone with all types of emoticons, and then proceed to wrote this blog post — which is to say, I never left work!

The user can actively share what they’re thinking, doing and so much more — without using words, but by conveying “tone” to an overall boring sentence. Then, you can hover over the abbreviation, and you are able to “Like” that interest, if you wish to stay up to date on it.

Could This Be Facebook’s New Revenue Outlet?

Mashable’s Samantha Murphy goes into more detail about these crafty icons. She is 100% correct that this should open up a new ad revenue for the company.

I foresee businesses wanting to build their brand into these icon sets, and have Facebook’s billions of users share their identity that way. As of right now, Facebook is just trying new concepts with their design and attempting not to clutter it — a challenging task for sure.

Needless to say, this is the best thing about web design — trial and error!

Could this Facebook’s new tactic to share business profiles? What are your thoughts?

I believe this could very easily parlay into a huge revenue increase for Facebook, but only if they can craft a way to allow business to share their brands’ logos, as icons.

New pay-per-click (PPC) outlets could be enticing for avid Facebook users to follow and “Like” brands.