Facebook News & Update: Messenger Adds New Reactions & Mentions; Makes Group Chatting Easy

Facebook is all set to add several new features to its Messenger app. This would make group chats easy and manageable. According to an announcement on Thursday, the social media giant, the chat app would allow users to leave reactions on particular messages as well as tag other users of a conversation.

Interestingly, the reactions in Messenger would work similarly as the Facebook app. Just holding down the message would bring up the reaction emojis to choose from. These would include emojis of love, smile, wow, angry, sad, no and yes. These are mainly designed for group conversations as The Independent reported.

The users would also be able to see which reactions were left a message. Apart from this, the users would also get to see the number of people who reacted on the lower corner. Those who are using Facebook Messenger would receive a notification when another user in the chatroom leaves a reaction on a message they have sent.

Apple had also launched a similar feature in its iMessage app launched in September 2016. The users using Apple's messaging app can hold their finger over the message to leave a thumbs up, heart, thumbs down, Ha Ha, question mark, exclamation mark reactions to the texts.

Facebook is also planning to launch another amazing feature that would allow Messenger users to tag other participants in a mention using "@" symbol before the other user's name. According to Time, the mentioned person would receive a specific notification letting them know they have been called out. But the users can also choose to mute the notification. This type of feature has been already common in Slack, Twitter, and Facebook's actual app.

These latest features are important to Facebook wants to hold on to its popularity as the top messaging app in the world. The new messaging app could make the Messenger group conversation interesting. The Mentions would prevent the need to scroll through the entire conversation to see the important message. Reactions would help users with shorter response to a message.