Emojis are engrained into our online communications. Even the most serious of brands will use social media emojis in their marketing strategy😎.
Why? Because an emoji provides a connection that seeing someone’s actual face would do. Frankly, cold hard text has a lot of work to do without them.
The emoji has steadily evolved alongside us, acting as essential communicators full of life and color…. With emoji, however, a few pixels can telegraph our thoughts and feelings in ways that are fun, clear, and emotionally resonant.
An Emoji For Your Thoughts – Claire Anderson, Art Director & Emojiologist – Microsoft Design
What are the emoji marketing statistics?
And if you think your older customer isn’t using them, well emojis are used by 92% of internet users – so they probably are.
Well, except for my parents. They still can’t get their head around them.
A winky face on a text message can lead to an hour of explanation on the phone 🙄🤪.
Facebook posts with emojis can increase the number of interactions by 57% and can boost shares by 33%.
On Twitter, an emoji can increase engagement for tweets by 25%. 🐣➡🦚
Those are some impressive stats for just adding some extra emojis to your posts. 😍
Plus, they are a universal language we all understand and now seamlessly drop into our text conversations.
Jenna Schilstra, in her Ted Talk, In defense of emojis, believes that emojis help us express ourselves better. We can understand each other better with the use of emojis👩👩👧👧.
How do you use emojis in marketing?
It’s not common to use emojis in print media or blog posts, but emojis are welcomed in social media and sparingly in email.
Emojis can also help your social media and email marketing by doing the following:
- Grabbing attention
- Shortening captions
- Punctuate your text
- Making your text more scannable
- Showcasing your brand personality
- Adding in emotional context and tone of voice
- Branding your copy
- Clarifying, contextualising and amplifying text
- Boosting enagement 👍
1. Grabbing attention
Where you only have one line to make an impact – like an email subject line, or preview line in LinkedIn or Instagram – emojis can help create a quick connection and convince people to click or ‘read more.’😮
2. Shortening captions
Emojis enable you to make a big statement with fewer characters 💥. Check out these emoji marketing examples from Twitter.
For more emoji marketing examples on Twitter, check out my post, What to Tweet as a Small Business.
3. Punctuate your text
Emojis are great for punctuating a long caption and highlighting those key points. 👆☝👇👈
4. Make your text more scannable
Cut to the chase with emojis for highlighting emotions, keywords and calls to action.
5. Showcasing your brand personality
Emoji marketing is a great way of branding your content. While you can’t make your own emoji you could agree on a set of emojis to use for your business.
I’ve seen a lot of brand coloured hearts being used or unusual choices for bullet point emojis used. It makes the captions recognisable.
A well-placed emoji can make all the difference to your text! Show a bit of personality and bring your text to life. 🐱👤
6 Branding your copy
Some brands use a set suite of emojis – making them instantly recognisable.
7. Clarifying, contextualising and amplifying text
Add in some context, tone or emotion with emojis.
8. Boosting engagement 👍
People love using emojis instead of writing actual words – and if they see you using them, maybe you’ll get some reciprocal love 🤑😍😘.
If you do use emojis, keep them relevant and use them to enhance not replace keywords.
What are the top emojis for building engagement?
According to Hubspot, these are the top ten emojis most likely to increase engagement:
- 🙆
- 🍒
- 🐠
- 💃
- 🌤
- 💘
- 😔
- 💕
- 😢
- 💓
Quite a few of these have double meanings!!! So don’t start using them all over the place.
It’s sad that ‘sad faces’ are popular – but people probably respond to that more than a – I’m winning at life emoji all the time.
But, according to Hubspot, the top emojis for increasing click-through rates are completely different.
- 🐙
- 🐴
- 👖
- 🍒
- 🚂
- 🏳
- 🌉
- 🆓
- 👇
- 🎟
The pointing hand is a great one – as it’s just a visual addendum to your Call to Action (CTA) and can help people quickly see where and what they need to do 👀.
How to check what emojis ACTUALLY mean?
Before you start throwing those emojis around.
Check out Emojipedia or Get Emoji first to see if there is a ‘double meaning’ attached to a particular emoji.🤔🤭. Octopus, eggplants, peaches and devils are ones to watch out for.
Usually, these emoji encyclopedias will tell you the double meaning.
Are there going to be new emojis for 2022?
Microsoft will be releasing some fluent 3D emojis to use in Teams, Windows and Outlook soon – with a few already available.
“Trust and clarity were guiding principles for us throughout this process. We wanted people to trust that our new emoji style would recognize their intentions and reflect their humanity. People aren’t perfect, and there is beauty in our originality, which is why we chose an imperfect circle to be the silhouette shape for a head.”
An Emoji For Your Thoughts – Claire Anderson, Art Director & Emojiologist – Microsoft Design
For android phones, watch out for some new emojis coming in September 2022.
These include a goose, a moose, ginger, peapod, jellyfish, maracas and a shaking face. Plus a light blue, light grey and finally – why has it taken so long – a PINK HEART!!!!!
There are also rumours of a bean emoji, but I can’t see it on the Unicode Emoji candidates list – but watch this space.
Top tips for using emojis in 2022
- Check what emojis your audience are using. Their meaning could have changed in your community or industry
- Check what’s popular
| 0 | 😂 ❤️ |
| 1 | 😍 🤣 |
| 2 | 😊 🙏 💕 😭 😘 |
| 3 | 👍 😅 👏 😁 ♥️ 🔥 💔 💖 💙 😢 🤔 😆 🙄 💪 😉 ☺️ 👌 🤗 |
- Get out of your comfort zone and see what other emojis are out there you can use
- 🚨Stop the scroll and put them in your first line or hook
- Use emojis to break up long text or punctuate lists
- Check how your emoji renders on each platform. You don’t want to just be left with a 🫖
- Don’t overuse them
- Use emojis to enhance your text and not replace those all important keywords. The exception being on Twitter where using emojis instead of words often works really well.
Conclusion
Using emojis should be second nature to you…but it should also be second nature to businesses on social media and in email marketing too.
However, you should always assess if emojis are right for your brand identity and for your demographic.
Give them a try, test what works and see what happens. 🐙🤗
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