Dive Brief:
- Emojis -- small pictures, or ideograms, like smiley faces, hearts and other shapes -- now make up 40% of messaging on social networks like Instagram and Twitter, according to a recent Business Insider Intelligence Report.
- Marketers looking to understand the emoji part of the conversation are now hiring third-party data sifters like Sprinklr and theAmplify, who is building a tool to understand emojis within conversations, to help decode their meaning.
- In one example, the Tastemade app encouraged users to post photos of their favorite food and analyzed the emoji response -- hands clasped together was generally interpreted as praise.
Dive Insight:
A serious study on depicting emoji language may be just what the doctor called for, especially when it comes to understanding consumer sentiment. Imagine how in-the-dark marketers would be if 40% of all words were weren't available for analysis. Emojis have become so pervasive that many brands are even trying to join the conversation by creating their own emojis (Foot Locker), while other brands (Oreo and PETA) have just incorporated emojis directly into campaigns.
Even advertisers have their own set of emojis specific to the industry. Emojis are no longer an outlier to digital conversations -- and therefore can no longer be ignored.
