Respond to Teams Messages with Multiple Emoji Reactions

Multiple Emojis Apparently Creates More Nuanced Responses

My life became complete when message center notification MC1084032 appeared on 27 May 2025 to announce that Teams users can add multiple emoji reactions when they respond to messages. Microsoft 365 roadmap item 491468 explains the need for the new capability, saying that allows users “to express a wide range of emotions effectively. Use combinations of emojis for a richer and more nuanced response, quickly conveying your feelings and thoughts, like agreement, urgency or sentiment, without extra replies—keeping discussions focused and efficient.”

Obviously, I never realized how deficient I have been in restricting myself to a single emoji reaction per chat or channel message. Now users can add up to 20 emojis in their response to messages, including custom emojis (maybe the new sticker generator promised for Paint will make it easier to create custom emojis).

Adding Multiple Emoji Reactions

Technically speaking, the ability for a user to post multiple emoji reactions isn’t hard to implement. The Graph chatMessage: setReaction API deals with posting reactions. The implementation is mostly client-side to lift the previous single reaction and permit up to 20 reactions instead (Figure 1). Users add emoji reactions through the more reactions button under the text of a message. Keep on clicking the button to add emojis. To remove an emoji added in error, select it from the set of emojis again.

Posting a reaction adds it to the collection of reactions for the target message. Although multiple reactions can come from individual users now, it’s really no different to managing a collection containing multiple individual reactions from multiple users.

The reaction list at the bottom of a message might be very colorful, but given that Teams supports over 800 emojis plus custom emojis, inviting users to create combinations of 20 emojis might result in more confused rather than nuanced responses.

As now, Teams lists the reactions in order of popularity (Figure 2) and ensures that the user viewing a message always sees their responses. In other words, Teams filters the response collection by the viewing user to list the most popular responses first. Other responses in the order they are posted then fill out the set of up to 20 emojis displayed under the message.

Schedule and Clients

Rollout is scheduled for early June 2025 to targeted release tenants followed by general availability in mid-June 2025. Full deployment, including to the GCC, GCC High, and DoD clouds should be complete by mid-August 2025. The new capability will be available in Teams desktop, browser, and mobile clients.

No administrative control is available to allow tenants to restrict users to fewer than 20 emojis. There’s also no way to disable the standard set of emojis at either a tenant or team level. I guess at this point no self-respecting messaging service could operate without supporting emojis in one form or another.

Will Users Notice Multiple Emoji Reactions?

Microsoft doesn’t say where the demand came from to warrant the investment to update Teams to allow users to add up to 20 emojis in a composite reaction to a message. I certainly have never heard of such a request, but I guess I’m not in the category of user that this change will please. I don’t think I shall ever contemplate how to combine emojis into a symphony of nuanced response. A simple thumbs-up reaction normally does the trick.

In any case, I wonder how organizations will communicate the news of the new capability to users. What form of words will they use to explain how to use multiple emojis to send effective responses. I’ll look forward to learning more.

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