Facebook emoticons can add humor and personality to your status updates. It's easy to learn how to add these special characters that are both eye-catching and fun to use.
What Are Facebook Emoticons?
Emoticons are pictures that you can type into your Facebook status, resembling common items such as happy faces, music notes, and hearts. These images are used to help illustrate the tone of the text, or to simply decorate a status message or comment.
Another popular area of Facebook where emoticons are used is Facebook chat. Most Internet chat rooms are full of smiley faces and other emoticons, with many assigning special keyboard shortcuts to the most common ones. Facebook chat is a bit behind in this area, as it only provides a handful of images to be used. Of course you can still create your own emoticons in any situation, simply by using standard keyboard letters and symbols.
Standard Emoticons
You've likely seen many standard emoticons on Facebook, which consist of combinations of symbols and letters to resemble faces expressing various emotions. Turn your head sideways to the left to see the faces. There are dozens of these in use, but some of the most common include:
- :) - a happy, smiling face
- ;) - a wink
- :( - a sad face
- :P - tongue sticking out
- 8-) - a face with glasses
Facebook emoticons of pictures other than faces can also be expressed with standard keyboard characters, such as <3 to resemble a heart.
In Facebook chat, many of these emoticons will show up as little pictures rather than the characters used to create them. In status messages and comments, however, they will appear as typed.
Special Facebook Emoticons
Other emoticons are actual images of things like musical notes, faces, hearts, and other shapes. These are created on most PCs and laptop computers by holding down the keyboard's "Alt" key and typing a number or series of numbers. Make sure you're using the numbers on your keyboard's number pad rather than those at the top of the keyboard for these symbols. Some examples of these emoticons are:
- Heart - Alt and 3
- Happy face - Alt and 1
- Music note - Alt and 1,3 or Alt and 1,4
- Sun - Alt and 1,5
- Arrow pointing up - Alt and 2,4
- Arrow pointing down - Alt and 2,5
- Trademark symbol - Alt and 0,1,5,3
You can play around with different combinations of numbers to see what symbols will show up. Keep note of the ones you like so you can use them often!
If you have trouble with typing the symbols into status updates, bookmark a list of them such as this one at fsymbols.com, and you can copy and paste the images into your Facebook messages. They will appear just as if you'd typed in the codes yourself.
Third Party Emoticons for Facebook
There are some third party applications that claim to give you many more available emoticons for use in your Facebook status updates as well as Facebook emoticons for chat. Some of these can work, but only if your friends also have the application installed. Those who don't share the application will not be able to see your pictures.
Other applications are outright scams, searching for personal information and sending themselves to your friends without your permission. Always do a bit of research on this type of application to make sure it's legitimate before installing it on your Facebook account.
Have Fun with Emoticons on Facebook
For most people, Facebook is a way to communucate with friends and keep things lighthearted, so it's a great place to have a little fun and express yourself. Whether you're using lots of hearts to show love and gratitude or just playing around with the various emoticons available, Facebook emoticons can be playful and fun to use. Sometimes it's easier to express yourself with images, even on social networking sites.
