Washington/New York, Feb 25

Facebook Inc advertisers love the idea of using the social network’s new anger, humour and other emoticon buttons

to better target audiences, but they are :( that the company is not letting them do so right away.

The network, with 1.6 billion users, on Wednesday rolled out its new ‘Reactions’ button, which expands the range of emotional responses far beyond the ‘thumbs up’ known as ‘like’. Facial expressions tagged ‘love’, ‘haha’, ‘sad’, ‘angry’ and ‘wow’ now can be used to respond to a post.

But Facebook will not differentiate between the responses to determine a user’s interests when it places ads and other posts in a customer’s news feed. All reactions will be counted as additional likes, meaning Facebook will assume that the user wants to see more similar content, even if the person responded with an ‘anger’ emoticon.

Facebook said it would decide later how new reactions should be weighted to personalise news feeds. But that is not soon enough for advertisers, who want to fine-tune their messages now.

Corporations would be eager to study responses to determine whether chronic users of ‘sad’ or ‘haha’ buttons were more likely to buy different products, for instance, advertising executives said.