In the absence of physical and vocal gestures used in face-to-face interactions, emoticons have become the accepted substitute for our body language, facial gestures, and tone of voice in online chat. Emoticons make one’s message clearer; they help us let other people know if we are being sarcastic, sincere, sad, even mischievous.
On Facebook, there are hundreds of free emoticons you can use to help convey the entire facet of your messages. Where do the ‘hundreds of free emoticons’ come from when you don’t see any emoticon menu on Facebook?
Two categories of Free Facebook emoticons
While you don’t see any smiley/emoticon app on Facebook, this doesn’t mean you can’t use smileys in your chats. To understand better how you can call these Facebook emoticons to your Facebook conversation, let us discuss the two categories of free emoticons.
1. Default Facebook emoticons
Facebook has developed its own library of smileys to help Facebook users express better their thoughts and feelings. However, the emoticons are hidden, which means you need to enter the right codes to call the Facebook emoticons to your chat. You may either memorize the codes or Google them every time you need to use the smileys.
Facebook’s smileys for different emotions are rather few, although common emotions and facial gestures like smile, frown, happiness, anger, and sadness are represented. The social networking site offers fun emoticons like the Putnam emoticon, Pacman emoticon, and penguin emoticon. However, the proprietary Facebook emoticons look graphically simpler and less animated than emoticons you find in other IMs like Skype and Yahoo Messenger.
2. External emoticons
The great thing about Facebook is that it is an open platform. It doesn’t restrict you to its own built-in applications. The site allows you import applications from other developers. What this means is that you can import and use smileys from other sites if preferred.
There are several websites that offer free smileys for Facebook. Often, developers offer their application as a web browser extension. You will be required to download and install the app. After you have downloaded the app, a toolbar will appear on your Facebook account. Clicking on the toolbar will give you a new world of Facebook emoticons.
Often, the third party apps offer more variety of emoticons and more elaborate graphical designs than Facebook’s native emoticons. In addition to emoticons for various feelings and states of mind, some apps also offer emoticons for holidays and events as well as winks, sound emoticons, text emoticons, and more.
Since the emoticons are not hidden, you simply open the toolbar/menu and click on the one you want to use. For some Facebook users, this makes external emoticons more fun and more convenient to use than Facebook’s proprietary emoticon system.
Facebook Emoticons for Status Messages, Wall Posts
Free emoticons for Facebook can be categorized further into three: those that you can use strictly on Facebook chat, those that you can post on your status message or wall, and those that you can use on both.
Facebook’s proprietary emoticons belong to the first category. They can’t be added to your status message or wall post except for one, the heart emoticon (>3).
Some third-party developers, on the other hand, have created smileys that can be posted to status messages and wall posts, allowing you to enhance your Facebook in all its facets.
Free Emoticons for Facebook
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