The Deeper Meaning of Emojis: What You Need to Know on How Social Media is Changing Communication

The Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year for 2015 was in fact not a word. It was the ‘Face with Tears of Joy’ emoji. This one > 

You’ll no doubt recognise it – here’s how it looks across different platforms:

This feels like a significant acknowledgement that the way a large number of us communicate is shifting.

It’s no longer just teenagers or younger people who are using emoji’s, hashtags and neologisms – they’ve reached the mainstream.

In this post, we dig a bit deeper into how our language and communication has changed over recent years as we’ve adapted to interacting through social networks and apps, and we’ll also look at what this shift means for marketers.

Let’s go! 

The functions of language

Before we dive into how social media has changed the way we communicate and use language, it’s first important to understand the key functions of language.

This is a subject Vyvyan Evans, Professor of Linguistics at Bangor University, explains more on over at the Oxford Dictionaries blog:

“English, like any other natural language, has two major communicative functions. The first is an ideational function: to get an idea across, as when I say, It’s raining, or I love you. It also has an interactive-interpersonal function: to influence the attitudes and behaviours of others, and, in a myriad ways, change an aspect of the world’s states of affairs in the process.”

Here’s how the two functions could look in marketing terms.

To get an idea across:

Here we have a banner from Amazon.com, very clearly letting you know there is a sale on:

To influence the attitudes and behaviours:

Here is a very different piece of marketing communication from Apple — this example feels far more aspirational and aims to influence our attitudes and behaviours.

Whenever you’re writing, whether it’s an email, tweet or blog post, it can be great to think on these major functions: Are you trying to get a point across or influence attitudes and behaviours?

More than words can say: The emoji revolution

On awarding the ‘Face with Tears of Joy’ emoji the Word of the Year title, Caspar Grathwohl, president of Oxford Dictionaries, explained:

“When you look back at the year in language, one of the most striking things was that, in terms of written communication, the most ascendant aspect of it wasn’t a word at all, it was emoji culture.”

Emoticons have been around since 1982, but only actually moved into mainstream communication over recent years as social media has grown and emojis reached phone keyboards.

Now, 6 billion emoji’s are sent every single day and according to Swyft Media, 74 percent of people in the U.S. regularly use stickers, emoticons or emojis in their online communication, sending an average of 96 emojis or stickers per day.

How people are using emojis

“The fact that English alone is proving insufficient to meet the needs of 21st-century digital communication is a huge shift.” – Casper Grathwohl

One area Twitter have noticed a lot of emoji use is in tweets about TV, where fans can discuss what’s happening, how they feel about what they’re watching.

Twitter found that the ‘Face with Tears of Joy’ emoji is by far the most popular emoji used in TV tweets:

It’s typically used to convey laughter, but it doesn’t just see prominent usage in tweets about comedy programming: it’s the top emoji across all genres, as well as all times of day. Another popular emoji is: 

Signaling that users are loving what (or who!) they’re seeing on TV.

Here are the top 10 emojis used across TV tweets:

What this highlights is that we’ve moved beyond the simple smiley face andwe’re now turning to emoji to convey extra meaning and emotion within the messages we send.

How emojis are replacing words

It feels like we’ve reached a point where in some cases, emojis have started to replace altogether, the words we send each other digitally, whether in an email, IM or tweet.

For example, here’s how the expression of laughter has evolved:

(Hat tip to Marcus for this excellent example)

This evolution is backed up by a study from Instagram. What Instagram found is that many popular emoji have meanings in-line with early internet slang and have been adopted as a way to replace these words.

Here are a few emoji and the slang Instagram found them to represent:

•  : lolol, lmao, lololol, lolz, lmfao, lmaoo, lolololol, lol, ahahah, ahahha, loll, ahaha, ahah, lmfaoo, ahha, lmaooo, lolll, lollll, ahahaha, ahhaha, lml, lmfaooo
• : beautifull, gawgeous, gorgeous, perfff, georgous, gorgous, hottt, goregous, cuteeee, beautifullll, georgeous, baeeeee, hotttt, babeee, sexyyyy, perffff, hawttt
• : #keepitup, #fingerscrossed, aswell, haha, #impressed, #yourock, lol, #greatjob, bud, #goodjob, awesome, good, #muchlove, #proudofyou, job, #goodluck

Instagram also found that the rise in emoji popularity also correlates directly with the decline of internet slang:

So whereas 10 years ago we may have abbreviated “that made me laugh” to“LOL”, now in 2016, we’re effectively replacing full sentences with emoji to convey the same meaning.

Emoji as a way to complement words

Communication is very visual and when it comes to text-based communication,“we’re babies,” explains Tyler Schnoebelen, a linguistics Ph.D. from Stanford, to NY Magazine.

Schnoebelen also points out that we’re only now learning to write at the speed of talking (e.g. text or instant messages) without any physical contextual clues. He explains:

If you are talking to someone face-to-face, you don’t need an additional word or symbol to express “I’m smiling” because you would, presumably, be smiling.

In the 1950’s, psychologist Albert Mehrabian, determined that only 7 percent of communication is verbal (what we say), while 38 percent is vocal (how we say it)and 55 percent is nonverbal (what we do and how we look while we’re saying it).

Here’s a great visual representation of this by Rob Tatman:

Therefore, when we’re not communicating face-to-face, the vast majority of our communication skills are negated.

Emojis have become a way to convey the tone and non-verbal context behind our texts, IMs or tweets and work amazingly alongside snippets of text as a way to give more context to a message.

Take the below tweet, for example, the use of the ‘Face with Tears of Joy’ gives some key contextual clues to the text, indicating that the tweeter was laughing as they typed:

3 more ways social media has evolved the way we communicate

1. Acronyms & abbreviations

As the Internet and mobile communication has grown, so has the collection ofacronyms and abbrevations we use on a daily basis.

My first experience of communicating in this way was through SMS when I’d use abbreviations like “spk l8r” to save valuable characters in my messages.

Though, in some cases, emojis have replaced some acronyms and abbreviations, they are still very prominent in social media and have made irreversible impacts on the way we communicate.

2. Hashtags

Since they were first introduced on Twitter, hashtags – clickable keywords used to categorize content –  have become increasingly important to the way we communicate – both online and offline.

Hashtags were intended to be, and are still used as, ways to follow conversations about a topic. For example, to keep up with news about my favorite football team I check #itfc.

Hashtags have also grown into a way to express our feelings and emotions. For example, ending a tweet about going on holiday with “#NoMoreCold”, could imply excitement about heading for warmer shores.

Lauren Schuhmacher explains in a Huffington Post blog post:

“What we’re gaining from hashtagging is a new way to communicate ideas, more concise than ever. We can share, with one funny little symbol, a host of ideas that are merely tangential to our original thought, but that somehow manage to clarify or add to it.”

3. Neologisms

“Social media is making it easier than ever to contribute to the evolution of language. You no longer have to be published through traditional avenues to bring word trends to the attention of the masses,” wrote Jon Reed on the Oxford Dictionaries blog.

One of the most prominent examples of this is the word “Selfie.” The earliest use of the word was traced back to a forum post in 2002 and it wasn’t until a decade later when the word became extremely popular and even found it’s way into the dictionary.

What you can see from the below graphic, though, is its meteoric rise in popularity throughout 2013:

With Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat and other social media channels offering instant interaction with far-reaching audiences, it’s never been easier for words to spread and embed themselves within our day-to-day vocabulary.

Katherine Connor Martin, head of U.S. Dictionaries at Oxford University Pressexplained to Esquire:

It’s an amazing thing for lexicographers in this day and age, with things like Twitter—such unredacted, unedited speech—to see [words gaining in notoriety] in real time, as it offers a written record of what was once just oral slang. Slang is often very transient, first appearing in subcultures, and then tends to be proliferated online.”

What this means for marketers: 4 ways to better communicate with your customers

It feels clear that language and the way we all communicate have greatly evolved since social media hit the mainstream.

What may not be so clear is how you can use this knowledge to get the edge over your competitors. Here are the top things businesses should consider:

1. Make brand interactions and engagement simple

If the rise of social media, emoji and abbreviations teaches us anything, it’s that we are looking for more effective ways to communicate with each other, faster. The brands that win are the ones that will deliver amazingly simple customer experiences.

For an great example of this, check out how Uber and Facebook Messenger have simplified the experience of getting somewhere:

Another example is Domino’s emoji pizza delivery. Once customers have registered an ‘Easy Order’ account with Domino’s – including details of their pizza preferences – simply tweeting a pizza emoji will result in a delivery.

2. Make communication easy to follow

A big part of social media success is making your brand or campaign story easy to follow. This is something Taco Bell had great success with during their campaign

Nearly 33,000 people signed a virtual petition created by Taco Bell, pushing for a taco emoji to be created. When their request was accepted they celebrated with the #TacoEmojiEngine.

If you tweeted @TacoBell the taco emoji + any other emoji you’d then be surprised with one of 600 unique taco inspired photos, gifs or sounds.

The campaign was extremely fun, but what really made it stand out to me was how they’d brought a group of taco enthusiasts together and told the story in an easy-to-follow way across social media and their website.

3. Test, test, test

Emoji and many neologisms have hit the mainstream and are becoming increasingly ingrained in popular culture. However, marketing and brand communications using emojis and newer words, phrases and abbreviations may not be for everyone.

We’re in the midst of a major shift and there’s likely to be some audiences that have embraced newer forms of communication, and will respond positively to them, and there are other audiences that aren’t quite there yet.

It could be good to start small, and test an approach that may work for your brand.

4. Tap into emotion in brand messages

Studies have shown that brands that can connect with their buyers on an emotional level will see 2 times more impact than those who are still trying to sell business or functional value.

Try to think how the language you use and communication you send out can help build emotional connections.

It could be important to remember how emoji can help convey the tone and non-verbal context behind the copy you use in any adverts or social media posts.

Over to you

Have you noticed social media changing the way you communicate? Have you tried any marketing campaigns using emoji? I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences.

Excited to join you in the comments! 

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Will Facebook’s “Empathy” Button Be Good News For Marketers?

Marketing experts weigh in possible impact of Facebook's plan to test a way for people to express shorthand emotions other than Like.

Facebook’s Like button is about to have company. One question: Will marketers give it the thumbs up?

It almost certainly won’t be a “dislike” button, but it will give people a shorthand way to express other-than-positive emotions. That could mean an emoji-based interface, as some Facebook patents seem to indicate. Or it could be something else. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is looking to give people a way to express empathy for unfortunate news and events while avoiding the creation of a situation where people are seen to be down-voting others’ posts. Building a new system that finds that balance is “surprisingly complicated,” Zuckerberg said, but Facebook is close to releasing a test version.

Marketers will be closely watching what Facebook comes up with. Currently, businesses have to dig to see negative feedback about their posting activity on Facebook Pages. Within Insights, at the post level they can see how many people hide a post, hide all posts, report spam, or the dreaded unlike a page because of a post. That information isn’t public, but feedback from Facebook’s upcoming button could broadcast consumer reactions more widely.

So is that a good thing? It’s tough to say definitively yet. We asked a handful of marketing experts to weigh in about the potential impact. Here are their emailed responses:

Katy Keim, Lithium

Generally speaking, I’m concerned the new dislike concept will lead to more bad behavior than good — vitriol or bullying or worse. I don’t think everything needs to be rainbows and ponies, but the potential to so quickly express negative comments could bring out our worst selves. At Lithium, I view the thumbs up (and thumbs down) behaviors as online gamification principles — which means we should use these activities to motivate the right behaviors and while Facebook sees this as motivating “empathy,” unfortunately I don’t believe that will be the end result.

For brands, I think the button poses some risks. Yes, it provides another low barrier engagement option which will result in widespread participation. However, there has been a trend that consumers shame brands freely — sometimes not in the most productive ways. I think this will only increase this behavior. It will have the effect of reducing qualitative comments and more nuanced opinions. It’s a shortcut to sentiment and I think one where simplification results in less.

Ultimately this move benefits Facebook more than brands. They don’t own the experience, Facebook does. While brands may see number of likes vs. dislikes, Facebook will have access to a significant amount of more in-depth data about users as a result of this. How much they are willing to share with brands who manage pages on Facebook will be interesting.

Lynette Young, ClaimWizard

I don’t feel the “dislike” button affects (or SHOULD affect) marketers at all on Facebook because it is really being designed to show compassion and support for status updates such as illness or losing a family member. Of course if the Facebook API is opened up to disclose the dislike button a slew of marketers could target (prey?) on those in sad situations.

Nate Elliott, Forrester Research

If this new feature is just about expressing empathy and solidarity, as Zuckerberg indicated it might, then it likely won’t have much of an impact on people’s relationships with brands. (Do you know many cases where people feel motivated to express empathy for a brand?)

But if it allows people to express a broader range of emotions, that could be useful. For one thing, brands would be tempted to count the number of people who “like” and “love” and “respect” them and use that data as a success metric (though the data would likely be meaningless for measurement, in the same way social sentiment data has little correlation with brand satisfaction data).

More importantly, it could one day let marketers target fans based on those fans’ relationships with the brand. Today, most people’s Facebook interactions with brands are binary: you either like a company or you don’t. But what if Delta could deliver one message to flyers who genuinely love the company and a different message to people who may not love the brand but still fly regularly and need to stay up-to-date with the company? That could be powerful.

Jan Rezab, Socialbakers

First of all, it’s not a “dislike” button. I am sure you saw the original footage, where it’s more of just a different sympathetic emotion. Facebook still is a positive platform, and we don’t exactly know what it will shape like. Will it replace the like button for that particular post? Will it be extra? They probably won’t want to confuse the mobile experience. It might be different based on either TEXT or “FEELING” (the smiley face). We will see.

Kevan Lee, Buffer

More ways to engage with a post on Facebook feels like an exciting step for me. The more a marketer can know about how his/her messages are received on Facebook, the better those messages can become. Knowledge and data are hugely helpful in iterating on strategies — and this coming change feels like Facebook could be giving marketers more of both.

Emeric Ernoult, AgoraPulse

I think this is a very interesting move from Facebook as it will give users more ways to react to content. Users will definitely use this, no doubt, and Facebook will definitely leverage the data it gets back from those user actions. As far as marketers are concerned, if that is data they have access to in their metrics, especially the post performance metrics, I think it can be very useful.

As of today, the only way to see if users don’t respond positively to your content is the “negative feedback” metric. But that metric is flawed as it accounts for “hide post,” “unfollow page” and “report post” and actually, the “hide post” one is clicked the most, by far. And according to most users I’ve surveyed about that, users hide post because they feel their News Feed is cluttered, not necessarily because they “dislike” the post. Getting specific data about content that turned them off is actually more helpful than knowing that they want to see less posts from your brand. We all know that users prefer to see updates from their friends than from our business. But that doesn’t mean that they “dislike” the content itself.

Overall, I don’t think it’s a game changer for marketers, it will just give more accurate feedback about how their content is perceived.

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Why People Like, Share, and Comment on Facebook [Infographic]

Of Facebook's 1.25 billion monthly active users, 44% Like their friends' posts at least once a day -- and 29% do it multiple times a day. That's hundreds of millions of people interacting with content on the social network on a daily basis.

So what motivates people to Like Facebook posts -- and share them, and comment on them? And why should businesses care?

Research has found several psychological reasons behind why users enjoy using Facebook so much. For example, studies observing people browsing on Facebook found psychological indications of happiness, like pupil dilation. By uncovering this type of audience insight, marketers can apply this information to create more effective Facebook marketing campaigns. 

Intrigued?

Check out the infographic below from QuickSprout to learn more about why people use Facebook and what businesses can learn from it.

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Your Favorite Social Media Networks Are Turning Into Amazon

We’ve all grown accustomed to liking, re-tweeting, pinning, and sharing each other’s posts and materials in the world of social media, but all of that may soon be supplanted by the next step in social evolution: buying and selling.

Word is leaking that social media site Pinterest, a platform that more or less operates like a digital scrapbook, is planning on adding a “buy” button to its interface. The news comes our way via Recode, which reports that Pinterest has had the idea in gestation for a long while, and appears to finally be willing to pull the trigger on its implementation. The network itself boasts 70 million daily users, and by moving forward with its new e-commerce strategy, is finding a prime way to further monetize all of that traffic.

Like its social media counterparts Facebook and Twitter, Pinterest has focused on generating revenues through advertising sales thus far. But making the jump to e-commerce will be a rather large and potentially monstrously profitable change. And Pinterest isn’t alone. Both Facebook and Twitter have also been kicking the idea of adding a ‘buy now’ button to their platforms, and it appears that even Google will be getting in on the action.

The risk that these social media networks run when enacting this plan, of course, is that they will ultimately malign their respective user bases. That was the initial fear when Facebook first started to implement advertising several years ago, and instead of scaring away users, the company became an international business power. Thus, other networks followed suit by adding paid advertising with little to no negative effect. Adding e-commerce and further revenue-driving capabilities to these sites seems like the next logical progression for them to make, especially with coming valuations and plans for further expansion.

When you crunch the numbers on how much money is out there and up for grabs, it only strengthens the case for social media companies to jump into the fray. Amazon has really pioneered the platform for e-commerce over the years, and by adding “buy now” buttons to their interfaces, social networks will start to straddle industry lines by assuming a different identity than the one that sparked their initial growth.

  

Source: Thinkstock

Really, though, it’s hard to blame the leadership behind these social media giants for wanting to make this move.
 eMarketer reports that worldwide retail sales topped $22 trillion in 2014, and 5.9% of that — or $1.3 trillion — was through e-commerce sales. By 2018, that share is expected to grow to 8.8% of all sales, and probably continue an upward trajectory from there.

So, using 2014’s numbers, there is $1.3 trillion in potential revenue being spent by consumers online this very moment. It would really be foolish for social media companies — who already have some skin in the game on some level — not to try and siphon off some of those dollars for themselves. Social media use accounts for 22.5% of all the time Americans spend online, according to e-commerce company Wiser, and consumers are 71% more likely to buy products from a brand that they currently follow on social media. Companies like Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter obviously have our attention, so it only makes sense that they should bridge the gap between buyer and seller, while taking some commission for themselves.

Otherwise, wouldn’t consumers just jump over to Amazon and order it? There’s little reason not to simply step into that role, and act as the intermediary.

Again, the only real risk any of these platforms are running is changing the experience for their users, and ultimately scaring them away. But if all of these platforms are adding e-commerce capabilities at roughly the same time, it’s really limiting where users can ultimately flee to. That may not be intentional, but it’s certainly going to work in their favor. And it’s really unclear whether users will actually see their experience change on these sites, other than simply seeing “buy now” buttons, and actively using or ignoring them.

From a consumer and social media user’s perspective, the biggest difference the implementation of e-commerce protocols on social media networks may simply be that these platforms adopt a more Amazon-esque appearance or functionality. But they are social platforms first and foremost, so there probably isn’t too much to worry about.

For social networks themselves, there’s really no downside. With literally trillions of dollars up for grabs, there’s no reason no to wade into the e-commerce fight. Amazon and others may find a way to counter, but for now, online shopping is about to get a lot more social.

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