Love or hate emoji, they are here to stay. Do you know the popular phrase just stated with these emojis? Even if you don’t, these symbols pulled you in and made you want to read the content! Emoji are a powerful part of content today.  Emojis have taken over the way we communicate online.

Based on 6.7 billion tweets over the past 10 years, emoji use is at an all time high! According to Adobe’s Global Emoji Trend Report 2021, the laugh-cry face is the world’s most popular emoji.

ZoomInfo states that 92% of the online population uses emojis daily! This makes sense when you realize that images are processed faster by the brain, express feelings better and are more memorable. New emoji are introduced each year. During 2020, 117 new emojis were announced including a smiling face with tears, anatomical heart and everyone’s favorite drink, bubble tea! In 2021, 334 new emojis were approved, including some new favorites for the Denim team – the heart on fire and face in clouds. Next up for 2022, 107 new emojis have been approved so far including a melting face, heart hands and a disco ball! Here is a sneak peek at the Final List of Emoji for 2022.

According to a HubSpot study, participants who were sent messages with emojis remembered more of the message than those who were sent messages without emojis, indicating that emojis can make your message more memorable. Savvy businesses have started using emojis in the subject line of emails to garner more attention.

These tiny pictographs are fun, as well as memorable, but they also allow businesses to join consumers’ everyday conversations and help connect with them. From a marketing standpoint, emojis are certainly effective. According to Hubspot:

• One in five tweets now includes an emoji. Five billion emojis are sent on Facebook Messenger daily.
• Including emojis in email subject lines has been shown to increase open and response rates.
• Push notifications with emojis saw 85% increase in open rates and 9% bump in conversions

These little symbols are significant – they may be small, but they say a lot. Many brands have already managed to incorporate the language of emojis into their campaigns with huge success. For example, Burger King promoted the return of its Chicken Fries with emoji-based content on Twitter. In 2015, Dominos created a service that allows the consumer to order pizza just by texting them a pizza emoji.

What are Emojis?

First, let’s look at history and make sure we are all on the same page. Emojis are not the same thing as emoticons. An emoticon is a typographic display of a facial representation used to convey emotion in a text-only medium. Emoticons are symbols you can create from your keyboard, like 🙂 or 🙁 . They have been around for 20 years. Emojis are pictographs, or actual pictures, of everything from flowers to facial expressions that add personality to a text-based conversation. Emojis are graphics that you can cut and paste, but you can’t create them with your keyboard. Makes perfect sense? Right?

With that being said, there are 3,633 emojis to choose from. From a business standpoint, which of these expressions help increase engagement and which ones should you avoid altogether? Hubspot conducted a study of their own published posts across all social platforms: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and found the top 10 emojis that create engagement and the top 10 that most likely encourage click-through. To view their results, click here.