Are Emojis Engaging or Annoying? 🤔 A New Study Reveals The Answer

It’s no secret that emojis have become a well-established part of our digital culture. Heck, there’s even an animated movie about emojis coming out this summer. Businesses are also using emojis in their social media marketing, but is that a good idea? Do emojis make their content more entertaining or more cringeworthy?

The team behind quintly, a professional social media analytics platform, decided to explore this very question. They analyzed the Instagram accounts of 20,000 businesses and studied their 2016 emoji usage across 6.2 million posts. Here are some of the highlights of the study:

Are They Popular?

Quintly confirmed the popularity of emojis in the marketing world, as they found that 56% of the profiles they studied used emojis in December 2016. There is also a strong increasing trend in popularity- the use of emojis rose by 20% during 2016.

However, the use of emojis varies significantly across profiles of different sizes (i.e. number of followers). Profiles with larger followings are more likely to use emojis than smaller profiles. For example, at the end of 2016, 75% of profiles with +10 million followers used emojis in their posts, compared to 26% of profiles with 1-1,000 followers. Perhaps emoji use is the secret to a large Instagram following!

There’s also a pattern to how businesses choose to use emojis in their posts. The Instagram accounts studied were just as likely to use emojis in image-based posts as in video-based posts. Businesses also have some favorites from the 1,851 emoji out there. The “camera with flash” icon was the most frequently used emoji amongst these accounts.

Are They Worth It?

So now that we’ve established that businesses on Instagram like to use emojis, are they actually useful? Quintly found that posts with emojis earn a 17% higher interaction rate. It’s clear that sprinkling some emojis in your social media posts can have a huge impact on your metrics. But please don’t go overboard. It is very possible to have too much of a good thing, as evidenced by the public’s less-than-stellar reception of The Emoji Movie.

The post Are Emojis Engaging or Annoying? 🤔 A New Study Reveals The Answer appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

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