Facebook Chat Stickers: What Are They & Should You Use Them?

When you chat via instant messenger clients, do you add smileys? Do you also like to add other emoticons to let people know when you’re hungry, bored, stressed and the rest? If so, you’ll probably enjoy using Facebook’s new stickers. These honestly-not-at-all-just-like-an-emoticon images are the latest craze for Facebook IM and they’re quite a bit of fun. How different are they from regular emoticons? Well, just you wait and see.
In fairly recent news, Facebook released chat stickers for the Facebook web client. For some reason this has been huge news, despite chat stickers being around on the iOS and Android clients for a few months now. Why? Well, because they’re fun. And now you can try them out, regardless of your mobile device and preferred OS. So, let’s take a look.


How Do I Use Chat Stickers?

Using Facebook chat stickers is really simple. When you’re chatting to a friend, click on the smiley face at the bottom-right of the composer box. A choice of sticker packs will come up and you can choose firstly which pack to use, then which sticker to send. The sticker is sent instantly to your friend.

How Can I Get Free Chat Stickers?

To get more stickers, click on the shopping cart icon instead of choosing a sticker collection. At the moment, there are many sticker packs available for free. In time, no doubt paid chat stickers will become available too.

Adding sticker packs will give you easy access to the sticker styles you like best from the numerous cute sticker packs available. You will then be able to quickly add stickers to IM chats from all of your favourite sticker collections.

More Ways To Get Chat Stickers

There are already private sites for getting more chat stickers, developed between Facebook’s mobile release and web release of chat stickers. One selection of custom chat stickers is available as the ChatStickers Chrome extension.

It’s aimed at Reddit fans, featuring AdviceAnimals pictures, memes and rage faces, and reaction faces. As far as reasons for using stickers go, this gets to the heart of it. When you need the perfect response to something a friend has said, you now have Reddit-style reaction faces on hand to respond appropriately in a matter of seconds.

Hidden Stickers

The ChatStickers Facebook Page both enlightens readers as to the concept of “Hidden Stickers” and exposes stickers for what they really are: Just pictures. On their page there are a number of sticker images with instructions on how to use it as a hidden sticker. You share the image as a private message, and voila! It’s a sticker. Now, just think about this. You can do that with any image you like. Yes, hidden stickers are images you can’t yet find in a Facebook sticker collection.

Facebook Chat Stickers Vs. Emoticons

So, why is Facebook suddenly going crazy with stickers instead of leaving us be with our old friends, the emoticons? Well, I think it’s to do with the size of the images and the resulting colour injected into messages. I think also, with the new addition of images in comments, that we will soon be able to put stickers into regular Facebook comments too.

Stickers are different than emoticons. They’re detailed illustrations of characters with personality. Sending stickers is a way to share how you’re feeling with your friends. When you tap a sticker, it automatically sends it to the friend you’re chatting with. – Facebook

What’s the real difference between the two? Well, emoticons rest in-line with your text and can sometimes be typed in by using the right combination of characters, eg. :) will turn into a smiley emoticon. Stickers can’t be invoked via text and are sent as a separate line to text.

If you’re mid-way through typing something in Facebook web chat and you send a sticker, your text will still be waiting for you in the composer section, unsent. This is not always the case with the mobile clients though. Some of them have been known to delete your text if you send a sticker while you’re typing.
Conclusion: Will Facebook Stickers Stick?

In short, Facebook stickers are really just images. What makes sticker packs useful and fun though, is that they’re colourful and expressive in much the same way as emoticons are, yet they are bigger than emoticons, not sent in-line with text and are more varied in nature. Adding your favourite sticker packs means you have quick access to cute images which you can send in response to conversations with friends. And why not?

What do you think of Facebook stickers? Have you given them a go or will you stick with your emoticons for now?

Here is another site to have a huge Collection Facebook Chat Stickers:  Symbols And Emoticons