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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What’s the ROI of Digital Marketing? [Infographic]

Image courtesy of Occam’s Razor

As you see above, defining the ROI of digital marketing is a challenge.

Measuring it is easy, once you have the right definition.

What’s a Tweet worth?

People ask me all the time: What’s a social post worth?

My answer?

Likely NOTHING!

Yeah, I know. Lots of folks disagree with me, but, as noted in the infographic below, the answer is — it depends.

Does that mean digital marketing doesn’t work?

Absolutely NOT!

The value of digital marketing

First, the value of a Tweet or Like or Pin depends on the size of your network — the larger the network, the greater the value of a social post. A network of 16,000 Twitter followers requires only 6 Tweets to return a value equal to the average US car payment– $450.

But the story doesn’t end there.

Size is only one element relevant to the value of digital marketing. Engagement is a much bigger reflection of value. A highly engaged network shares much of what you post across social networks. All those Likes, RT, Re-Pins, etc add up to huge amplification of your message. Thus, a single Tweet, Post, Pin gets magnified to a much larger audience than the original network.

Owned versus earned media

In digital marketing, we refer to this as owned versus earned media. Owned media belongs to the brand and represents their Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, etc. Earned media represents the amplification you earn through motivating followers to share your posts.

Engagement comes from posting the “right” content — content your followers find valuable. Valuable content:

• Solves a problem
• Entertains
• Respects your followers

In addition, the right content is posted on a consistent basis when your target audience is likely online. Earned media is likely the most valuable media and much cheaper than paid media (online advertising).

Why is earned media so valuable?

Earned media has so much value because it has the appearance of objectivity. Think about it, we’ve all become so jaded by advertising we barely listen when brands tout their benefits. But, when friends tell us something, we believe them. A Tweet from a friend we believe.

When your followers share your content, they not only amplify your message, they de-commercialize it — make it more believable because it comes from friends rather than the brand. The value of earned media is so valuable, Facebook even use it to support sponsored posts by showing you which friends like the brand.

So, it’s not just the size of your network, it’s how engaged they are.

Influencers

Some brands pay influencers by offering money or free product (hence the offers made to influencers with high Klout scores). I personally think paying influencers is a bad practice as it calls their motivations for sharing content into question and, if used frequently, dilutes their value. I’d encourage brands to develop relationships with influencers rather than paying them.

But, putting the motivation issue aside, evaluating influencers needs more than just assessing the size of their network, and evaluating how well they do in terms of engagement.

Building engagement

If engagement is more valuable than the size of a social network, an important question is: How do you build engagement?

Valuable content

Again, the best trick to building engagement is producing valuable content on a consistent basis. Value comes in the eyes of your target market. Sometimes that’s creating content that solves a problem — like this. In other cases, content that’s interesting, unusual, funny, surprising, or emotionally charged drives engagement.

My advice to new clients is to try various types of content, then see what works best with your target audience by monitoring both reach and engagement for each post. Likely, some combination of entertaining and problem-solving content works best.

Be sure to avoid over promotion. A recent guest post argued for the 80/20 principle where content is concerned — 80% valuable, 20% promotional . I actually try for something closer to 10% promotional content.

2-way conversations

You need to engage with followers if you expect them to engage with you. Thank them when they share your content and when they say something nice about your brand.

User generated content

Treat your network as a valuable part of your social network and get them to generate content.

Ask their opinions about your brand, hold contests to encourage them to generate content about your brand, provide tools to create a true community around your brand.

Engage employees

Employees are likely the best advocates for your brand. Not only can they act as evangelists, they can share unique perspectives about your brand that consumers find engaging. For instance, someone working to make the product might share a typical day at work, a buyer might talk about how he/ she builds relationships with suppliers, a sales person might share about interactions with retailers.

Sharing insider knowledge makes consumers feel like they’re getting a backstage tour of your operation and makes them more engaged with your brand.

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The Biggest Social Media Science Study: What 4.8 Million Tweets Say About the Best Time to Tweet

Imagine removing all guesswork when you schedule your tweets, knowing the times that work for maximum clicks and maximum engagement.

As someone who shares frequently to social media, this info would be fantastic to have! We’re always eager to dig up new research into social media best practices—things like length and frequency and timing.

The timing element, in particular, feels like one where we’d love to dig deeper. And we just so happen to have a host of data on this from the 2 million users who have signed up for Buffer!

With a big hand from our data team, we analyzed over 4.8 million tweets across 10,000 profiles, pulling the stats on how clicks and engagement and timing occur throughout the day and in different time zones. We’d love to share with you what we found!

The best time to tweet: Our 4.8 million-tweet research study

Our key learnings

Wow, we learned so much looking at the awesome stats from those who use Buffer! Here were some of the takeaways we came up with. I’d love to hear what catches your eye, too!

• Early mornings are the best time to tweet in order to get clicks.
• Evenings and late at night are the best time, on average, for total engagement with your tweets
• In some cases, the most popular times to post are opposite of the best times to post.
• Popular times and best times to tweet differ across time zones.

The most popular time to tweet:

Noon to 1:00 p.m.

We’ve taken the data from all tweets sent through Buffer to find the most popular times for posting to Twitter. Looking at all tweets sent across all major time zones, here is an overview of the most popular times to tweet.

• Noon to 1:00 p.m. local time, on average for each time zone, is the most popular time to tweet
• The highest volume of tweets occurs between 11:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m., peaking between noon and 1:00 p.m.
• The fewest tweets are sent between 3:00 and 4:00 a.m.

Here’s the chart for the most popular times worldwide, taken from an average of 10 major time zones (the times represent local time).

Here is the graph for the most popular times to tweet in each of the four major U.S. time zones. 

(We normalized the data to account for daylight’s savings in the U.S. as well.)

Here are the charts for the major time zones in Europe and Africa.

(Note: The London (GMT) time zone used to be the default time zone for new Buffer users, so our data for GMT is not as clean as we would like it to be. We’ve omitted any takeaways for GMT from the research results here.)

Here are the charts for the major time zones in Asia and Australia.

It’s interesting to see how the most popular time to tweet varies across the time zones. We’ve shared Buffer’s 10 most popular time zones in the charts above. Here’s a list of each most popular hour for the 10 major time zones.

• Los Angeles, San Francisco, etc. (Pacific Time): 9:00 a.m.
• Denver (Mountain Time): noon
• Chicago (Central Time): noon
• New York, Boston, Atlanta, Miami, etc. (Eastern Time): noon
• Madrid, Rome, Paris, etc. (Central European): 4:00 p.m.
• Cape Town, Cairo, Helsinki, etc. (Eastern European): 8:00 p.m.
• Sydney (Australian Eastern): 10:00 p.m.
• Hong Kong (Hong Kong Time): 8:00 a.m.
• Tokyo (Japan Time): 2:00 a.m.
• Shanghai, Taipei, etc. (China Time): noon

For any clarification on this or the other research throughout this article, feel free to leave a comment and we’ll get right back to you.

Takeaways & thoughts:

• The most popular time to post could be due to a number of factors: This is when most people have access to Twitter (perhaps at a work computer), this is when online audiences are most likely to be connected (see Burrito Principle), etc.
• Should you post during the most popular times? That’s one possibility. Also, you may find success posting at non-peak times, when the volume of tweets is lower.
• If you have a large international audience on Twitter, you may wish to locate the particular part of the world where they’re from, and adjust your schedule accordingly. You can find the times when your audience may be online with tools like Followerwonk and Crowdfire.

The best times to tweet to get more clicks

We were excited to dig into the specific metrics for each of these tweets, too, in hopes of coming up with some recommendations and best practices to test out for your Twitter strategy.

First up, the best time to tweet for clicks.

Looking at the data, we found the following trends for maximizing your chance to get more clicks:

• Tweets sent between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m. earn the most clicks on average
• The highest number of clicks per tweet occurs between 2:00 a.m. and 4:00 a.m., peaking between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m.
• The fewest clicks per tweet happen in the morning (when tweet volume is particularly high), between 9:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m..

The data in the below chart is the worldwide average, calculated for the local time in each time zone. So the peak at the 2:00 a.m. hour would hold true as the overall top time no matter which time zone you’re in—2:00 a.m. in Los Angeles, New York, Cape Town, Hong Kong, etc.

For the specifics on each of the best time to tweet for clicks in each of the major time zones in Buffer, here’s a breakdown.

• Los Angeles, San Francisco, etc. (Pacific Time): 2:00 a.m.
• Denver (Mountain Time): 7:00 p.m.
• Chicago (Central Time): 2:00 a.m.
• New York, Boston, Atlanta, Miami, etc. (Eastern Time): 11:00 p.m.
• Madrid, Rome, Paris, Berlin, etc. (Central European): 2:00 a.m.
• Cape Town, Cairo, Istanbul, etc. (Eastern European): 8:00 p.m.
• Sydney (Australian Eastern): 2:00 a.m.
• Hong Kong (Hong Kong Time): 5:00 a.m.
• Shanghai, Taipei, etc. (China Time): noon
• Tokyo (Japan Time): 8:00 a.m.

Takeaways & thoughts:

• Clicks was far and away the largest engagement metric that we tracked in this study (compared to retweets, replies, and favorites).
• Some of the recommended best times for individual time zones show thatnon-peak hours are the top time to tweet for clicks. This data may reflect some particularly high-achieving posts—some outliers—that bring up the average when the volume of tweets is lowest. Still, it’d be a great one to test for your profile to see what results you get.
• One neat thing to keep in mind is that a non-peak hour in, say, Los Angeles may correspond to a peak hour in London or Paris. The worldwide audience is definitely one to consider when finding the best time to tweet.

The best times for overall engagement with your tweet

We define engagement as clicks plus retweets, favorites, and replies. When looking at all these interactions together, we found the following trends formaximizing your chance to get the most engagement on your tweets:

• Tweets sent between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m. earn the most total engagement on average
• The highest amount of engagement per tweet occurs between 11:00 p.m. and 5:00 a.m., peaking between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m.
• The smallest amount of engagement happens during traditional work hours, between 9:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m.

Takeaways & thoughts:

• The best times to tweet for engagement are quite the inverse of the most popular times to tweet. (The late-night infomercial effect—tweet when fewer people are tweeting—seems to be the case here.)

The best times for retweets and favorites on your tweets

Adding together two of the most common engagement metrics, we found some interesting trends for maximizing the retweets and favorites on your tweets, especially for those with a U.S. audience.

Looking at 1.1 million tweets from U.S. Buffer users from January through March 2015, here were some of the notable takeaways we found:

• Tweets sent at the 9:00 p.m. hour in the U.S. earn the most retweets and favorites on average
• The highest number of retweets and favorites occurs between 8:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m., peaking between 9:00 and 10:00 p.m.
• The lowest retweet-favorite engagement happens at 3:00 a.m.

(Interesting to note, the takeaways from this data compared to the worldwide engagement data differ slightly for a couple reasons: 1) clicks represent a huge portion of overall engagement, and 2) the worldwide vs. US datasets vary.)

We’d love to make it easy for you to share these results with your audience, your friends, your clients—anyone you think might benefit from them.

>> Download every chart from this post (.zip) <<

The methodology for our research

We studied all tweets ever sent through Buffer—4.8 million tweets since October 2010!

Based on this sample set, we looked at the number of clicks per tweet, favorites per tweet, retweets per tweet, and replies per tweet, in accordance with the time of day that the tweet was posted to Twitter.

Further, we segmented the results according to time zones, based on the assumption that the learnings might be more actionable if they could be specific to exactly where you live and work.

We had an interesting opportunity to consider whether median or average would be the better metric to use for our insights. It turns out that so many tweets in the dataset receive minimal engagement that the median was often zero. For this reason, we chose to display the average.

Over to you: What are your takeaways?

We’re so grateful for the chance to dig into the stats from the many tweets that people choose to share with Buffer. The data is super insightful, both for sharing with others and for impacting our own social media marketing plans!

What did you notice from the stats here?

Did any of the results surprise you or get you thinking about your plans in a different way?

I’d love to hear your take on this! Feel free to share any thoughts at all in the comments!

Image sources: IconFinder, Blurgrounds, Death to the Stock Photo, UnSplash

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