Emoji's and Your Business

Did you know it was World Emoji Day on the 17th of July? Yeah, we didn't either.

Emoji's. We love them, or we hate them, but what we can't deny is that the use of these little pictures has grown so dramatically that they even have their own movie! What has been dubbed the 'modern-day hieroglyphic' – consumers and businesses alike are jumping on the bandwagon to tout a total of 700 million uses in everyday Facebook posts. So how do you use them, and what's the real benefit for your business?

The triumphant rise of the emoji' actually started way back in 1990's Japan, and it's all thanks to a man named Shigetaka Kurita and his company Docomo – one of the first mobile companies. The word 'emoji' can be translated as 'image character' whose first creation was the 'heart'. They quickly backed it up with 176 more creations and sparked the emoji revolution. Today, there is a total of 2,823 emojis in the 'Unicode Standard' – and their own dictionary – the Emojipedia!

The real question, though, is why should businesses be involved?

To start with, according to this report, 92% of online consumers use emoji's in their everyday lives. In fact, 900 million emojis are sent every day without text. Consumers are developing such a close emotional relationship to these little image characters – particularly falling in love with the 'Face With Tears of Joy' and the 'Smiling Face with Heart-Eyes'. Even the heart emoji is now being used twice as much when compared to Facebook statistics in 2017.

There's a lot of love out there, and if the consumers are using them like wildfire, you should probably too, by utilizing them to make your business look more personable. People do business with people they know, like, and trust – and if used effectively - will increase engagement and conversion rates for your social media posts! Hubspot told us that Facebook posts with emoji's can increase the number of likes by 57% and the number of comments and shares by 33%!

Interestingly enough, the most popular consumer emoji doesn't directly relate to the best emoji to use in business. Like an 'absurd game of Pictionary', not one of the top emoji's proven to encourage either engagement or click-through even include our standard yellow faces – leaving it up to our imaginations how these randomized emojis such as 'cherries', 'horses' or the 'octopus could be used.

If you need further proof of emoji popularity, the Kardashians even released their own line of emojis in 2015, which reported an increase in brand awareness and favourability. It's all about making sure you know the audience your business targets and finding the emojis that best relates to them.

Now we feel we have to warn you – take care to research the emoji's you want to use in your posts before you post them! One example given on emojipedia was that only 7% of people actually use the peach emoji as a fruit instead of colloquially used as a butt. And you should probably never use the eggplant.

There are many creative ways to use emojis outside of a simple posting, too – with companies creating their own emoji videos, 'guess the emoji code' competitions and even in delightful little works of art featured on varying social media channels.

So to wrap it up - if a picture tells 1000 words, then businesses have the potential to craftily use emoji's to create stories that say more than they ever could over text – and thus reach more of their target market, create much higher engagement and improve their click-through rates too!