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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How to Use Social Media to Get Sales

First thing first; social media does NOT fix a broken business. I have had so many business owners and entrepreneurs approach me and say “I want more sales with social media NOW”. Unless your business has incorporated social media with your marketing strategy, and sales funnel you won’t be able to fully reap the benefits.

Social media is more than just posting an update on Facebook or sending a Tweet. As a business, you need to find a way to connect with your target market in an engaging way whilst also making sure they included in every stage of your sales funnel. Here is how to use social media to get sales.

I came across a great visual from Rohan Ayyar on Search Engine Watch that took the traditional sales funnel and created a new one, named the purchase funnel which is a consumer focused marketing model.

Of course there are going to be different variations of a sales funnel as social media continues to evolve however, this funnel is definitely the one that I feel is most sincere in how we should approach social media.

Let’s break down the image;

Awareness

You might not know where your customer has come from, and this might be the first time they have come across your business so building your awareness through sharable content is crucial. The first impression is always the most important so you be as engaging as possible.

There are various different ways you can build your awareness and engagement. Ask your audience questions and encourage feedback. Remember, engaged audiences are more likely to become brand advocates. There are some great tools you can use to stay on top of your social media analytics and respond in real time – try Hootsuite.

Familiarity

Your customer is now aware of your brand, and has become familiar with your business. Having a community that is familiar with your brand gives you the upper hand when they are making a purchasing decision between two brands.

This is where your community turns into followers that like your social media activity, and read your blogs online. Email marketing steps in at the point, as you should be finding ways to generate leads through e Courses, Downloads and other complementary content.

Consideration

The consideration stage of this funnel is where the customer is looking at purchasing your product/service. They will be comparing prices and options before making their decision. To make sure the “consideration” turns into a purchase, you need to build, and grow your reputation.

Social media is a great place to share positive reviews about your product/service and will build your reputation. Having “share” buttons on your website is a great place to start when sharing your message across multiple platforms.

Purchase

The penultimate step in this purchasing funnel, is a customer’s buying your product/service. This is where most businesses lose their momentum as they think the engagement stops here. It doesn’t. You need to be engaging throughout and after the purchasing phase to make sure they are staying in your sales funnel, and could potentially spend their money with you again.

Loyalty

This is the crucial stage for understanding whether you can build on your customer retention, or whether you’ve got a one stop shopper. Some of your customers will leave and never purchase from you again whereas others will return – this depends on how transparent and helpful you are through the purchasing process.

This is a huge priority as returning customers is what ultimately brings in new customers when leaving great reviews, and sharing your content.

Don’t forget to use social media as a customer service outlet, reward those who are loyal to your business and always stay engaged with your customer at every touchpoint of their purchasing journey.

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Why Do People Share What They Do? Here's What Neuroscience, Psychology and Relationships Tell Us About Highly Shareable Content

What makes you stop scrolling through an article, open up a social media app and hit the share button?

Is it logic, emotion, or something else?

Turns out, there’s more to social sharing than just measuring metrics:Psychology.

The strange nature of our brains is the reason we hotly debate the color of a dress or why we freely and emotionally share a post by a grieving widow after the death of her husband or why we feel an urgent need to pass on that video of the ice-cream eating dog to our animal-loving father-in-law. (Guilty!)

It’s not logic that guides those shares; it’s emotion. How else can you explain 8.2 million hits to a YouTube music video that a majority of people claim to have not liked?

If you want your content to be shared and shared regularly, understanding the “why” and “how” behind social shares can go a long way in showing you how tocraft the perfect post for your audience. In order to do so, you might want to:

1. Understand why people share content
2. Know what kind of content they’re more likely to share
3. Set about the task of creating content that satisfies those emotions

We’ve put together a few handy tips on how to understand what your audience wants and start the process of delivering it to them.

5 Reasons Why People Share to Social Media

1. Neuroscience: We share to entertain, inspire, and be useful

Even though social media does have a tendency of having people focus on themselves, the primary reason that people share things on their Facebook pages or Twitter feeds, research shows, is to be useful to others.

In a 2013 study conducted by psychologists at UCLA, the researchers were, for the first time, able to determine which brain regions are associated with ideas that become contagious and which regions are associated with being an effective communicator of ideas.

The TPJ or the temporoparietal junction is this area of the brain that lit up during functional magnetic resonance imagine (fMRI) brain scans when people were first exposed to new ideas that they would later recommend.

Matthew Lieberman, a UCLA professor of psychology and of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences and author of the book Social: Why Our Brains are Wired to Connect, noted:

Our study suggests that people are regularly attuned to how the things they’re seeing will be useful and interesting, not just to themselves, but also to other people. We always seem to be on the lookout for who else will find thishelpful, amusing or interesting, and our brain data are showing evidence of that. At the first encounter with information, people are already using the brain network involved in thinking about how this can be interesting to other people. We’re wired to want to share information with other people. I think that is a profound statement about the social nature of our minds.

2. Psychology: We share to express who we really are

In 1986, psychologists Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius recognized that there is a disparity between our “now self” and our “possible self.”

In a paper they published at the time, they developed the concept of our possible selves:

1. the ideal selves that we would like to become
2. the selves that we could become, and
3. the selves that we are afraid of becoming

This first self, the idealized version of ourselves is what we frequently tend to share on social media.

Whether or not this representation of our possible self is realistic or not is irrelevant, researchers note. The point is that we’re picturing in our minds this possible self that we are or may someday be and sharing information that fits in with this notion of who we are.

When we share in this mode, sometimes what we’re sharing is a sense of our ideal self and who we aspire to be. This is why some people share political commentary, outrage over particular issues, and success stories of people who they hope they can be like someday.

As the authors themselves so eloquently note:

Possible selves contribute to the fluidity or malleability of the self because they are differentially activated by the social situation and determine the nature of the working self-concept. At the same time, the individual’s hopes and fears, goals and threats, and the cognitive structures that carry the are defining features of the self-concept: these features provide some of the most compelling evidence of continuity of identity across time.

3. Community: To nurture our relationships

Whenever I see a funny comic about procrastination, I share it with my closest friend, a proud procrastinator. Whenever I see a funny dog video, I send it straight to my father-in-law, the animal lover.

Every time I see any of these things, I feel an immediate connection to those people. I think of them and feel the urge to share what I’ve found with them.

I’m not alone.

In a study undertaken by The New York Times Customer Insight Group in conjunction with Latitude Research titled “The Psychology of Sharing: Why Do People Share Online?” 78% of respondents said that they shared information online because it let them stay connected to people they may not otherwise stay in touch with.

Further, 73% of them said they shared information because it allowed them to connect with others who shared their interests.

4. Motivation: To feel more involved

In my days of daily journalism, an editor at a local newspaper once told me his fix for a slow news day.

Dogs and babies.

“They’re cute,” he would say. “They pull at your heartstrings. No one can resist a cuddly dog or a cute baby. Preferably both together.”

The medium may have changed but the message hasn’t. People still love cuddly dogs, cute babies, preferably both together.

In fact, as far back as fifty years ago, studies were being undertaken to see why people talked about brands and coming to the same conclusions that we are today. In 1966, in a study reported on by the Harvard Business Review, the researcher Earnest Dichter found that 64% of sharing is about the sharer themselves.

He noted that there were four motivations for a person to communicate about a brand.

1. The first (about 33% of the time) was because of product-involvement, that isthe experience was so good, unique, or new that it had to be shared.
2. The second (about 24%) was self-involvement, that is, to gain attention byshowing people that you were part of an exclusive club of buyers or had inside information.
3. The third (around 20%) was other-involvement, that is wanting to help out and express caring or friendship.
4. And finally, the fourth (also around 20%) was message-involvement, that is,the message was so wonderful or funny or brilliant that it deserved to be shared.

5. Altruism: To get the word out about specific causes

In the New York Times Customer Insight Group report, 84% of respondents said they share because “it is a way to support causes or issues they care about.”

In fact, the report further goes to show that 85% of people say reading other people’s responses helps them understand and process information and events. So not only do we share information about the causes that are dear to us, but we respond to causes that are dear to other people if they take the time to share that information with us through social media.

Remember the ALS Ice Bucket challenge?

What People Share and How to Make Your Content Go Viral

In a research study titled “Why Content Goes Viral,” assistant professor of marketing at the Wharton School of Business Jonah Berger (who you may also know as the author of the book Contagious) and co-author Katy Milkman looked at 7,000 articles published at The New York Times to see which ones got the most views and social shares and why. The goal of the study was to document what makes content go viral and how to replicate those findings to create viral content.

This infographic from CoSchedule does a great job capturing some of the findings of the study:

The researchers from the study came up with three key ideas based on their findings:

1. Positive content trumps negativity

You may not know it from your Facebook feed, but Berger and Milkman found that positive content and stories were far more likely to be shared and to go viral than negative news stories.

Are you surprised by this finding? Most people are. But the reason bad news sticks in our minds more than good news is because of our brain’s “negativity bias.” Human brains are wired to react with greater sensitivity to bad news and feedback than anything positive, and so you may see and hear a hundred pieces of positive news throughout your day but remember that one news story about a sick child. It also explains why you remember an insult or attack decades after all the compliments and accolades have been forgotten.

Yet, research shows that if you want your content to go viral and reach more people, it has more of a likelihood of doing so if it comes in a positive package.

How to create positive content

Try framing events in a positive context. Research shows that superlatives can be super effective in headlines. For example:

• Best
• Biggest
• Greatest

As Courtney explains in this post, Buffer’s focus on positivity and happinessmeans that we turn this technique inside out with posts such as 10 Things To Stop Doing Today to Be Happier, Backed by Science.

2. Content that evokes high arousal emotions does better

This is probably not quite as surprisingly, but Berger and Milkman found that the more a piece of content could evoke a high-arousal emotion such as awe, anger, anxiety, fear, sadness, humor, or wonder, the better its chances of being shared repeatedly and going viral.

That’s why counter-intuitive takes on issues do so well and why articles that make you angry are often the ones that you forward to friends.

In fact, this is backed up by our own research here at Buffer. In a recent experiment, we found that one of the key things that makes images go viral is an element of surprise.

In the NYT study, the articles that scored highly on different dimensions were:

Emotionality:

• Redefining Depression as Mere Sadness
• When All Else Fails, Blaming the Patient Often Comes Next

Positivity:

• Wide-Eyed New Arrivals Falling in Love with the City
• Tony Award for Philanthropy

(Low-scoring)

• Web Rumors Tied to Korean Actress’s Suicide
• Germany: Baby Polar Bear’s Feeder Dies

Awe:

• Rare Treatment Is Reported to Cure AIDS Patient
• The Promise and Power of RNA

Anger:

• What Red Ink? Wall Street Paid Hefty Bonuses
• Loan Titans Paid McCain Adviser Nearly $2 Million

Anxiety

• For Stocks, Worst Single-Day Drop in Two Decades
• Home Prices Seem Far From Bottom

Sadness

• Maimed on 9/11, Trying to Be Whole Again
• Obama Pays Tribute to His Grandmother After She Dies

How to create emotional content

One of the driving forces for emotional content is someone’s first touch with your content: the headline.

There are some amazingly useful tools out there to help ensure your headline packs the right emotional punch.

• CoSchedule Headline Analyzer – This fantastic tool will quickly tell you how to improve your headlines by scoring you on your word choices. It takes a look at the words in your headline and sorts them into four categories: common, uncommon, emotional, and power. The more emotional and power words, the better your headline.
• Advanced Marketing Institute Headline Analyzer – This free tool analyzes your headlines to determine the Emotional Marketing Value (EMV) score of your headline. The tool analyzes the total number of EMV words in relation to the total number of words in the headline and comes up with a score.

3. Practical and useful information wins out every time

Finally, no surprise to anyone who has read and shared our own content here at Buffer (thank you, by the way!), content that helps you solve a problem, gives you actionable tips, and shows you practical strategies for living your life is destined for success as long as it can meet the needs of a large number of people and do it in a unique and interesting way.

How to create practical, useful content

In her article Transforming Content From Lifeless to Actionable, blogger Amanda Gallucci offers the following tips on how to do this effectively. She writes:

1. Involve your audience: This might involve comments, surveys, or questions, but most importantly, referencing your audience in the content itself. Gallucci suggests creating interactive modules that readers can use within the content itself.
2. Link your research to applications: Research and numbers are great, but showing how users can apply that research to their lives or solving their problems can be a great way of providing value.
3. Look beyond your industry: When it comes to inspiration, don’t let your industry experts be the only thing that guides you towards creating useful content that is a match for your audience. If your business focuses on finances and numbers, considering learning from creative businesses, and vice versa.
4. State the intended outcome early on: Whenever you’re creating a piece of content, it’s always a good idea to state, right upfront, what the visitor or reader will get if he or she reaches the end of the article. Make a promise to your reader to teach or educate them, and then keep it.
5. Think ahead: One of the best things you can do for your content is to have an editorial calendar that guides your day-to-day content decisions and gives you the flexibility and room to comment on industry-specific events and anniversaries and give readers an analysis of any big news that comes up in your space.

So there you have it. Be positive, touch on some emotions, and be useful. The three keys to creating content that gets shared again and again. And again.

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