There are only 26 letters of the alphabet, but most of us have access to a language with over 1,600 characters at our fingertips – and there are another 72 on the way. Emojis are the latest iteration of mobile language; we’ve come a long way from txtspeak.

Emojis were originally developed as a simple way to share emotions in the digital realm. But now, even academics – often seen as the most technologically impaired among us – have recognised the trend, with Oxford Dictionaries awarding the 2015 Word of the Year to Unicode U+1F602, better known as the Face With Tears of Joy emoji.
Emoji marketing specialists, Emogi, claim that emojis are used by 92% of the world’s online population. This makes it one of the most-used languages on earth and certainly the fastest-growing.

To put this into perspective, it’s evolving faster than ancient languages such as hieroglyphics. The language itself, Unicode, is completely mobile friendly, so emojis are easy to instantly share across different platforms such as social media or instant messaging. It is also universal, meaning it is available across platforms such as Android and iOS.

As is often the case with digital trends, it didn’t take long for some of the larger advertisers to jump in. Bud Light tweeted stars, flags and beers to represent the US flag on July 4th. Domino’s built a mechanic to order a pizza through Twitter, simply by tweeting the pizza emoji.

A little closer to home, House of Fraser’s attempts at using emojis with its #Emojinal campaign garnered much attention, but these were mainly comments of disbelief, confusion and ridicule. The mistake House of Fraser made was to misunderstand how its consumer actually uses the language. In doing so, the single social media campaign damaged its 167-year-old tone of voice in just 24 hours.

However, there are many beneficial ways brands can get involved in the trend, and not just for those targeting texting teenagers. Emojis are becoming a meaningful way of enhancing your identity online, and could improve engagement.
Some advertisers might even be able to use emojis as shorthand for their brands, even without developing their own emoji keyboards – just think of the purple heart emoji that has been dedicated to Prince, and the lightning bolt to David Bowie.

Brands should look at incorporating the language where it’s appropriate, rather than crowbarring them in to appeal to a younger audience. Even the notion that emojis are a young person’s way of communicating is a fallacy. In fact 90% of 35+ year olds use emojis to communicate with others.

The next stage of evolution for marketers will be to begin to analyse the language, specifically for data collection such as sentiment tracking. Twitter this month announced that advertisers would be given the functionality to target users by emoji – perfect for fast food or entertainment brands. However, a real benefit of this will be to measure the emotional response to subjects or brands based on the emoji they’ve tweeted alongside.

Sometimes emojis can say more than words ever could – and sentiment will certainly be easier to measure through angry or happy faces, rather than ambiguous #hashtags.

 

Jonny Harrison, the7stars

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