What do Facebook's new Reactions mean for business pages?

Facebook users finally had the prayers answered when the social network launched Reactions this week – little stickers that enable users to react to posts and photos with feelings other than the Like button.

While this is great news for consumers, what do the new reactions mean for Facebook business pages?

"We see this as an opportunity for businesses and publishers to better understand how people are responding to their content on Facebook," explains Sammi Krug, Facebook product manager.

"Page owners will be able to see Reactions to all of their posts on Page insights. Reactions will have the same impact on ad delivery as likes.

"We will spend time learning from this rollout and use feedback to improve," Krug says.

Krug says Pages should continue to post things that their audience finds meaningful and continue using Facebook's Page post best practices.

"News Feed is the central way you can get updates about your friends, family and anything that matters most to you, and the central place to have conversations with the people you care about," Krug says.

"Our goal with News Feed is to show you the stories that matter most to you.

"Initially, just as we do when someone likes a post, if someone uses a Reaction, we will infer they want to see more of that type of post," explains Krug.

"In the beginning, it won't matter if someone likes, 'wows' or 'sads' a post — we will initially use any Reaction similar to a Like to infer that you want to see more of that type of content.

"Over time we hope to learn how the different Reactions should be weighted differently by News Feed to do a better job of showing everyone the stories they most want to see.