Do Social Media Reactions Increase User Engagement?
Do Social Media Reactions Increase User Engagement?
Ever since the introduction of Facebook reactions in 2016—which feature reaction buttons like “love”, “haha”, “wow”, “sad”, and “angry”—many other brands and companies have followed suit with the same formats.
In 2019, LinkedIn announced the launch of LinkedIn Reactions, in which users can mark posts as “funny”, “insightful” or “curious”, and take a stance on whether they “love”, “like” or “celebrate” them. In 2020, Instagram added a feature that allows users to react to DMs and stories with emojis. And now in 2022, we can leave emoji reactions on iMessage, Slack, Zoom, Snapchat, and almost every other online platform.
We even see icon reactions being used in the real world; in many mall, restaurant or airport bathrooms, visitors can find emoji feedback machines, where they can rate their experience based on restroom cleanliness.
As a part of the LiveLike audience engagement suite, we prioritize making this type of self expression a given on your platform in order to show your audience you care about their opinions, and give them a way to share their thoughts with the rest of the community.
In this article, we’re breaking down the top four reasons why social media reactions work successfully to increase user engagement on your platform.
1. It Allows Your Users to Express Themselves
The depth and range of human emotion is far too wide and complex to narrow down to a simple “like” button. People want to be able to express themselves and share their opinions as often and with as few limitations as possible, whether they’re in the real world or interacting online.
In other words, it isn’t enough to give something a thumbs up or down, people want to be able to cheer on posts or experiences they support and appreciate, show dismay or rage to the ones they disagree with, and question the ones they don’t understand.
When users are given a broader range of emotions to react with, they are also more likely to feel comfortable engaging with content, as it takes less than a second and they know their reaction is less likely to be misconstrued. For example, previously users only had the option to use the traditional “like” button if they wanted to engage with a post, regardless of if they actually liked the content or not.
With reactions, they are no longer limited or at risk of being misunderstood, and can engage freely in a way that may lead to richer, more intelligible discussion.
2. It Shows Your Customers You Care About Their Input
The difference between a passive user and a loyal fan is often determined by simply letting them know you value their opinion and want to know what they think.
By giving your users more options to express their thoughts or feelings on your platform, you are telling them that you care about what they think about your content, and are going to use that information to give them a better experience. When the option to react to posts isn’t there, it subconsciously lets your users know you are not a people-first platform.
Not only does this ability to express themselves give your fans more freedom, it also results in the collection of valuable user data regarding the content on your platform. While they feel heard and perhaps engage in more meaningful discussion about the different reactions given, you can start to discover what content resonates the most with your audience.
3. It Enables Conversation Between Users in the Community
With Live Chats being one of our major LiveLike solutions, we’re all about giving users the ability to communicate, and fostering productive or engaging conversation between fans. Doing so not only works to establish a sense of community and belonging for your users, but also boosts engagement rates on your platform, and gives you key insight into user opinions about your product, service, or platform experience. While live chats are a more obvious way to enable conversation, reactions are an equally strong force in getting people talking.
Take, for example, this post by Learn Basics, that makes great use of the LinkedIn Reactions format and saw over 15,000 reactions and 500+ comments:
By using reactions strategically and pairing it with a relevant poll question, this post successfully catches the attention of its viewers, engages them in sharing what is likely an opinion they feel passionately about, and entices them to start a conversation either arguing others’ message reactions or advocating for their own.
As well as being an effective way to start debates or discussions in the comment section, reactions also offer an extremely low effort option to interact with a post. Not everyone is comfortable leaving comments on social media, and not everyone has the time to craft the perfect response. Reactions are a quick, easy second option that still allow users to participate in the discussion and give their two cents, which in turn goes towards boosting your overall platform engagement.
4. It Creates Opportunities for Increased Brand Recognition
At its core, reactions were created to expand the limits of how users could express themselves online; but even still, the reaction options found on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn remain limited to around 4-5 emotion-based emojis.
That’s why, as a part of the LiveLike suite, we’ve pushed the boundaries even further by introducing the ability to react with custom brand reactions through build-your-own-bespoke UI. You can use the suite to introduce brand-specific emojis and GIFs that fans can use to respond to chat messages, sentences in a blog, images, or even moments in a live event.
Whether you’re in sports, music, edtech, or fintech, using brand and industry-specific reactions that are personalized to your niche target audience helps to make your fans feel special and to create a sense of community, all while helping to define your brand voice.
What’s more, launching brand-specific reactions—like the ability to react to something with an image of your company logo or a GIF of a player on your sports team—essentially works as a free way to have your own users spread the word about your brand, and build up your brand recognition.
At the end of the day, your users are looking to feel heard, share their thoughts and opinions with others, and connect with likeminded people in their community. With stock UI to use OOTB or build-your-own-bespoke UI to get added customization, the LiveLike Live Chats solution has everything you need to introduce fun, effective reaction formats for your fans to meet these needs.
Currently, LiveLike powers three different types of live chats—Public, Private, and Influencer—that all integrate reaction capabilities to engage users. Start boosting user engagement on your platform with social media reactions with the help of the LiveLike engagement suite.
Still not sure if gamification can be applied to your business platform? Get in touch today to learn more about how gaming elements can enhance your user experience.
The LiveLike Audience Engagement Suite is a finalist in the region's leading broadcast technology awards, recognising the fan engagement platform's work with sports broadcasters and rights holders
New York, July 31 - LiveLike, the fan engagement platform used by sports broadcasters, streaming services and rights holders worldwide, has been shortlisted for Best in Sports at the BroadcastPro ME Manufacturer Awards 2026 for the LiveLike Audience Engagement Suite.
The awards recognise product innovation, engineering excellence and technology development across the broadcast ecosystem. Finalists were selected across 21 broadcast and satellite categories following industry-wide voting and review by an independent panel of experts. Winners will be announced on Tuesday 6 October 2026 at The Westin Dubai Mina Seyahi Beach Resort & Marina in Dubai, UAE.
The Audience Engagement Suite gives broadcasters and rights holders a way to build interactive experiences directly into their streams and owned platforms - predictions, quizzes, live chat, rewards, loyalty programmes and community hubs - without assembling separate point solutions for each one. Every interaction feeds a single evolving profile of the fan, which the platform then uses to personalise what that fan is offered next.
That combination is the argument LiveLike has been making across the industry this year. Fan engagement has been mischaracterised as a set of features layered onto a broadcast, when the durable value sits underneath: the behavioural graph that every interaction contributes to, and the AI layer operating on top of it. LiveLike's AI layer, Genie, now runs a growing share of the programmes the company operates on behalf of clients, moving the work from manual content management toward automated orchestration.
The Middle East and North Africa is one of the most active regions in the world for this shift. Major tournament rights, rapid growth in sports streaming and rising expectations around second-screen and in-stream interaction have made direct-to-fan engagement a commercial priority for broadcasters across the region rather than an experiment.
"Fan engagement gets treated as a set of features bolted onto a broadcast, and we've never seen it that way," said Miheer Walavalkar, co-founder and CEO of LiveLike. "What we build sits underneath the experience. There are the surfaces fans actually touch, and then there is the profile of that fan which gets sharper every time they touch one. The second part is the part that compounds, and it's the reason a broadcaster can keep getting more out of the platform in year three than they did in year one."
"Being shortlisted in a category assessed by the people who operate live sport in this region carries weight," he added. "They know the difference between something that demos well and something that holds up on a match night."
Sports organisations have spent decades refining three core revenue streams: direct fan spend, media rights, and sponsorship. The playbook is well understood. What is less understood, and far less developed, is the data infrastructure that connects those streams to each other and to the fans who power all of them.
Most organisations know they are sitting on significant amounts of fan data. Ticketing systems, CRM platforms, social channels, digital content interactions: the signals are there. But in the vast majority of cases, that data sits in disconnected silos, producing consulting reports rather than actionable intelligence. The result is a fragmented picture of the fan - one that limits commercial potential across every revenue line.
On a recent episode of Future of Fandom, LiveLike CEO and co-founder Miheer Walavalkar sat down with Aidan Cooney, CEO of Envision Sport Group and co-founder of Opta, to unpack this problem in detail. Cooney has spent 25 years building data and fan intelligence businesses across football, cricket, tennis, and rugby. His perspective on unified fan data, the shift from B2B to B2C thinking, and the convergence of sponsorship and performance marketing offers a practical framework for any organisation trying to move beyond fragmented data toward genuine sports intelligence.
From performance data to fan data: the Opta origin story
Cooney's career started with a simple hypothesis. In the late 1990s, football's status as the world's biggest sport came with surprisingly thin storytelling. Broadcasts offered a scoreline, occasional possession graphics, and goalscorer information. American sports, by contrast, had long used statistics to bring audiences closer to the action.
"If you give fans a higher-resolution understanding of what's happening on the pitch, you bring them closer to the sport they love," Cooney explained. That principle drove the creation of Opta, which transformed how football was analysed, discussed, and consumed. The OptaJoe account became a case study in sports data storytelling, building a following of hundreds of thousands across media, journalism, and the broader sports industry.
But Opta was fundamentally about what happened on the pitch. The return path - how fans reacted to that information and what their behaviour revealed - became the foundation for everything Cooney built next: Ellipse Data, InCrowd, and ultimately Cortex.
The difference between a customer data platform and a fan data platform
One of the most important distinctions Cooney drew in the conversation is the gap between conventional customer data platforms and what a fan data platform actually needs to do. Standard CDPs are designed for rational, price-sensitive purchasers. A fan is something else entirely.
"A fan wants to belong. They're passionate about the player or the team they support. The data that matters to you is very different from a purely rational, transactional data proposition," Cooney said.
The implication is that transactional data - which most sports organisations have invested in through ticketing CRM - is necessary but insufficient. Behavioural data is where the real value sits: how a fan reacts to a particular piece of content, when they react, whether content about a specific player activates more engagement than content about the team as a whole. This is the layer that informs personalisation, shapes content strategy, and ultimately creates trackable, monetizable assets for brand partnerships.
Cooney's platform, Cortex, is designed specifically for this purpose: unifying transactional and behavioural data into a single fan data platform that can activate across channels. LiveLike's engagement and gamification tools then sit on top of that foundation, turning data into community and interaction into measurable value.
The silo problem and why unification comes first
When asked about the most common mistakes sports organisations make with their data, Cooney's answer was immediate: silos.
"Very few organisations have a true single view of their fan base. That is the starting point for everything." Some silos are functional, built by design for specific use cases like ticket sales. Others are structural, created by the relationship between leagues and clubs or by the patchwork of technology vendors an organisation has accumulated over time.
The cost of these silos is not abstract. Without a unified single view, organisations cannot connect their content strategy to their commercial strategy. They cannot attribute sponsorship value to specific fan interactions. They cannot retarget fans who engaged with a poll, a vote, or a piece of branded content. Every disconnected system represents lost compounding value.
Cooney's prescription is direct: "You can't activate until you unify." And the use cases for doing so - from personalised content delivery to integrated brand campaigns - are available now in ways they were not five or even three years ago.
Sponsorship, media, and the hybrid model
One of the most commercially significant ideas in the conversation was Cooney's framing of the convergence between sponsorship and performance marketing. Sponsorship, in its traditional form, has not fundamentally changed since Mark McCormack and Arnold Palmer in the 1960s. It remains an awareness play, hard to attribute, and increasingly constrained as a share of total brand marketing spend.
Performance marketing budgets, by contrast, are growing rapidly. Social media ads, YouTube pre-rolls, programmatic buying: brands are spending heavily on audience acquisition through channels that offer clear attribution. The problem for sports properties is that these two budget pools rarely connect.
"If you create a more diverse set of assets and present them as an integrated media plan, you open up new budget areas within brands," Cooney argued. The opportunity for rights holders is to bridge that gap by combining the premium, trust-based qualities of sponsorship with the attribution model of performance marketing.
In practice, this looks like branded content paired with interactive fan experiences - polls, votes, and predictions that generate first-party data - which can then be used for retargeting and attribution. LiveLike's interactive tools are designed to create exactly these kinds of measurable, brand-integrated fan touchpoints that produce both engagement data and commercial inventory.
AI, personalisation, and the crawl-walk-run path
Both Cooney and Walavalkar addressed the promise and the practical limits of AI-driven fan personalisation. The long-term vision is clear: AI that can serve individual fans with content, offers, and experiences tailored to their specific behaviours and preferences. The economics and infrastructure to do this at true 1-to-1 scale, Walavalkar noted, are still being worked out across every industry.
The pragmatic starting point is cohort-based personalisation. Group fans by location, by behavioural patterns captured in your fan data platform, by engagement tendencies during comebacks or winning streaks. Let cohorts emerge dynamically from the data rather than relying on predefined segments.
"By putting the fan at the centre and serving them at the cohort level, you improve the fan experience, which drives up engagement levels, which drives up the value of the inventory you create on the back of it," Cooney said. "If you then take it to the next level and use AI to super-serve the individual, you drive that engagement and value further."
The compounding logic here is critical. Organisations that delay building cohort-based personalisation while waiting for perfect 1-to-1 capabilities lose years of compounding value - both in fan engagement and in commercial inventory quality.
The B2C shift and why it matters now
Cooney's overarching thesis is that sports organisations are fundamentally B2B businesses today, structured around selling rights to broadcasters and sponsorship packages to brands. The future is B2C: direct, data-informed relationships with fans that create value for both the organisation and its brand partners.
This does not necessarily mean streaming video direct to fans - a path Cooney sees as extremely difficult given the sophistication of existing broadcasters. It means building digital properties that offer genuine value to fans, capturing the behavioural data those interactions generate, and using that data to create a fan balance sheet that reflects the true economic potential of the audience.
"The whole original idea, that the fan base becomes a real balance sheet item, becomes a reality," Cooney said. "And that balance sheet isn't just about the lifetime value of the fan to the sports organisation directly. It's about lifetime value, plus the opportunity for brands to invest in that person over the duration of their fandom."
Listen to the full episode
Hear the full conversation between Aidan Cooney and Miheer Walavalkar on Future of Fandom:
A unified single view of the fan is the prerequisite for every commercial use case in sport, yet most organisations still operate with fragmented data silos.
Fan data platforms differ from standard CDPs because fan behaviour is emotional, making behavioural signals more commercially valuable than transactional data alone.
The convergence of sponsorship and performance marketing opens access to larger brand budgets, but only if rights holders can offer integrated media plans with measurable, interactive assets.
Cohort-based personalisation is the practical starting point for AI-driven fan engagement - delaying it sacrifices years of compounding value in engagement and revenue.
Organisations that treat their fan base as a balance sheet asset - and build the data infrastructure to
LiveLike, the digital fan engagement platform, is powering eight confirmed World Cup activations spanning North America, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific, marking the company's largest simultaneous global deployment to date. The activations cover a cross-section of the sports media ecosystem, from major broadcasters and OTT platforms to payment providers and national football associations.
The deployments demonstrate LiveLike's capacity to operate at tournament scale, handling concurrent traffic spikes across time zones as billions of fans follow the world's most-watched sporting event. Activations range from prediction games (Play Predictor+) and loyalty leaderboards to trivia, squad selectors, community features, and gamified rewards programs - reflecting a broader industry shift toward interactive, data-driven engagement as rights holders look to convert passive audiences into identifiable, loyal fans.
Clients include CazeTV in Brazil, where a prediction game with their sponsor iFood is expected to generate record platform traffic, and Minute Media's Sports Illustrated, which is running a full-tournament match predictor covering every stage of the competition on its global digital platform. Additional activations are live with a leading European broadcaster operating a multi-event FanZone with gamification and a rewards shop, and a global payments company deploying wallet-based loyalty and leaderboard campaigns across Latin America.
The FA (Football Association) is using LiveLike to support its World Cup engagement strategy, while one of the largest North American and European sports media groups is using LiveLike’s whole tech stack in various ways across the world (Community, Mini-games, engagement etc…). SBS, Australia's public broadcast service has launched a complete match center experience, combining official World Cup Statistics & engagement widgets.
The scale of deployment reflects a deliberate infrastructure approach. LiveLike's platform is built to absorb the kind of unpredictable, high-volume engagement spikes that define knockout tournament football, where a single goal can trigger millions of simultaneous interactions across dozens of markets.
"The World Cup is the one event where everything has to work everywhere at once. There is no quiet period, no soft launch, no second chance," said Miheer Walavalkar, CEO and Co-Founder of LiveLike. "What we are seeing across these eight activations is proof that our platform does exactly what we built it to do: give every broadcaster, every rights holder, and every platform the tools to turn passive viewers into active fans, at whatever scale the moment demands."
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