Confession time: While everyone else spent the last week of February concerned about the presidential election and the (possibly) tanking overseas economy, the BFD of my week was the new Facebook Reactions.

Facebook had been beta testing its new reactions for quite some time in Spain and Ireland, which is why you may have heard whisperings of it off and on in your fav social media circles. Apparently the beta went well, because they rolled it out across the entire platform on Thursday, February 24, 2016.

Many speculate that the new Facebook reactions stem from FB users' requests for a 'dislike' button to counteract the thumb's up that Facebook has had since inception.

Mark Zuckerberg has released statements before saying that a dislike button is not going to happen: "Some people have asked for a dislike button because they want to say, 'That thing isn’t good.' And that’s not something that we think is good for the world. So we’re not going to build that" (You Can't Dislike This Article, Slate.com).

So, the new Facebook reactions are a way for users to express their feelings without turning the platform into a bigger elementary school playground for bullies (than it already is).

From both a personal and business' social media manager's perspective, I think that the new reactions are awesome. Not necessarily game-changers, but as one of my favorite You-Tube stars, Philip DeFranco, put it, they give brands the chance to get a deeper understanding of what their fans think of their posts.

**Disclaimer: For those of you not familiar with Philip DeFranco, beware of bad language and/or some content that may not be suitable for a work environment. You have been warned. In case you are at work and still want to watch the video (because he has some great insights), the link above will take you to the 3 minute, 15 second mark to avoid any mishaps for your convenience.**

Along this line of thought, Twitter has always kind of been seen as the place where brands can really interact with their followers on an intimate, two-way street, so to speak. However, with the new Facebook reactions, a brand can post a blog post or a story and see whether their followers "Love" the post, whether it makes them "Angry" or "Sad", or maybe they still just "Like" it.

This just adds one more facet to our understanding of how FB users are engaging and interacting on the biggest social media platform in the world. Definitely not a bad thing. 

But What Do The New Facebook Reactions Have To Do With HubSpot?

Well, now that you ask, everything! So let's connect the dots: Facebook rolled out the new reactions, and now every social media automation platform, including HubSpot, is looking like Sadness from "Inside Out". Why? Because all of their APIs are now outdated and inaccurate. (*Drops mic*)

This seems like such an obvious thing, and some of you may be saying, "Um, duh, what were you expecting?". But some of you may also be face-palming, asking yourself why you didn't think of that. If you're the latter, don't worry, that was me as well.

One of our clients was in the midst of scheduling out their social media and noticed an inconsistency between the new Facebook reactions reported on their page and the interactions that HubSpot was reporting. As soon as she brought it up to me (thanks again for the head's up, Liz!), I did the face-palm thing I mentioned above, and then called HubSpot Support. 

Gif via GIPHY

What Did HubSpot Support Say?

I expected the support rep on the other end of the line to meet my question with a scripted answer about how they were aware of the issue and their dev team was working on updating the API. However, I was not, which makes me think that there are more HubSpot customers face-palming than are admitting it. 

The support rep asked me to provide an example of the inconsistency, which I did, so that she could confirm that it wasn't a noticeable system issue that she could address. She then put me on a brief hold while she checked with her team, and confirmed what we were both thinking: it was an API issue. 

So, that's fine, whatever, when the biggest social media network changes things you expect there to be some API downtime. So I proceeded to ask her what they thought the timeline would be to get that updated, and she then told me that Facebook hadn't released the API support yet, so there was really no way to know. Um....okay. Way to be cool, Facebook. 

Moral(s) of the Story

Moral #1: 

Facebook has become an integral part of all of our lives, which sometimes means that they can make a gigantic change to their API and we won't realize exactly how big of an effect that can have on our reporting until it's wrong. 

Moral #2:

If you or your clients are using HubSpot for social publishing, or any other social media automation tool, be aware that until the API is updated, your "Interactions" data might be wrong.

Moral #3:

Always have a backup for your data. Never trust just one resource for all your information. Use a third-party resource, or at least compare Facebook Insights with HubSpot's reporting, just to keep everyone honest. 

Do you have any thoughts on the new Facebook reactions? What are your favorite third-party reporting resources? Any additional morals to add to this story? Share the love in the comments below!