In online chats, there is absence of vocal and physical gestures that are used in daily face-to-face interactions. This has paved way to the use of emoticons as body language substitutes. Emoticons now represent the various facial gestures and voice tones. Emoticons smileys make your message much clearer, as they depict when you are being mischievous, sad, sincere or even sarcastic.
On Facebook for instance, there are literally hundreds of emoticons that come for free that you could use in conveying your message's entire facet. You might be wondering where all these free emoticons come from, as there is no visible emoticon menu on the site.
There are two broad categories of emoticons smileys on Facebook.
Default emoticons
External emoticons
1. Default emoticons
Facebook developed its library of emoticons smileys to help its users to better express their feelings and thoughts. The emoticons are usually hidden, meaning that you have to enter the correct codes in order to call the emoticons to the chat. You could either Google or memorize the codes.
Smileys for the array of emotions are rather few on Facebook but the common ones such as happiness, frown, anger, smile and sadness are well represented. Other fun emoticons such as the Penguin, Pacman and Putnam emoticons are also offered by Facebook, and could be obtained Here.
2. External emoticons
Being an open platform is one of the main selling points for Facebook. This means that it is not mandatory that you only use applications that are built in. You are allowed to import applications from different sites and developers as well. All you are required to do is simply downloading and installing the app. After the installation, a toolbar appears on your account. Once you click on that toolbar, you are faced with a whole new collection of Facebook emoticons smileys.
