6 reasons why your brand should communicate with emojis 💬
To bring back a slightly cliché, yet accurate saying:
✨ A picture says more than a thousand words ✨
While emojis aren’t exactly pictures, they’re the closest you can get in text-format. Emojis are a great visual tool that can portray a wide array of emotions and help spice up your content.
Here are six great reasons why you should leverage the power of emojis in your brand communication:
1. They help your text stand out 💥
People have short attention spans, and they just keep getting shorter. We get bored easily, our brains are constantly looking for something to latch onto, and emojis are just that – they grab our attention. For example, in a sea of emoji-less tweets, a tweet with an emoji will immediately catch your eye.
2. Change the sentiment of a message 😄😠
Emojis can alter what emotion is communicated in a sentence. Have a look at these examples:
I can’t believe you did that 😂
I can’t believe you did that 🙄
I can’t believe you did that 😏
I can’t believe you did that 🤢
I can’t believe you did that 😡
I can’t believe you did that ❤️
As you can see, these emojis completely change the tone of the exact same sentence, and here we only showed you six (basic ones, might we add) out of the literal thousands of options (we checked – as of right now, October 2021, there are 3,633 official emojis). In other words, the possibilities are countless.
3. Text can be misinterpreted 🧐
Misinterpretation when reading is common, to say the least. As we just showed you in the example above, emojis help readers better understand the tonality and minimize the risk of your message being misunderstood.
4. Lingua franca 🌍
Emojis are basically a lingua franca: a common-ground language that people who do not share the same mother tongue use to communicate with each other. In other words, everyone can understand emojis, no matter what language they speak. When there’s an emoji involved, you don’t necessarily need to understand the text in order to understand the mood or context.
5. Increase engagement 💬
As we’ve explained many times now, people get excited by emojis. Using them is almost guaranteed to increase post engagement.
6. Create connections 👫
There are many easy ways to connect with your audience by using emojis. A classic that many brands and influencers use, is to ask followers to comment using emojis. People like to participate and share their opinions, and they get excited by emojis, but many are also a little lazy or impatient. So, when there’s an opportunity to participate and share one’s two cents by simply commenting one or two emojis, many like to join in, as very little effort is required. And it’s fun! This is an especially great tactic if you’re struggling with engagement.
Check out this example by Don Algodon (who just happens to be a Flowboxer 😏):
Also, this accidental example from our own Flowbox Instagram, where we didn’t directly ask for emojis, but received them anyway as our followers saw an opportunity:
Fun fact: the word emoji is Japanese and is, in itself, both singular and plural. So, in English, both “emoji” and “emojis” are accepted plural versions. ✅
All that being said, here are two very important things to keep in mind when communicating with emojis:
Don’t spam
It’s one thing for your followers to comment the same emoji x10, but it comes off as slightly unprofessional when brands do it, at least in captions. Using more than one emoji is fine, but in that case, use different emojis and limit yourself to ~three.
Don’t: “Hope you’re all having a great day! ☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️”
Do: “Hope you’re all having a great day! ☀️” or “Hope you’re all having a great day! ☀️🧡🌻”
Right place, right time
Emojis can be a truly great tool for marketing and brand communication, but you still need to be considerate of when to use them. If used correctly, they can help your brand with approachability, engagement and more, but if used poorly, emojis can tarnish your brand with unprofessionalism.
For example, we usually don’t include this many emojis in our blog posts, but we did here to make a point. Instagram is always a good platform, but your press releases definitely don’t benefit from including emojis.
More information:
Bianca Rior, Digital Marketing Specialist, Flowbox
bianca.rior@getflowbox.com
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