Emojis Talk. Should Brands Listen?
KS&R's Social Insight Exchange (SIX) provides businesses a view into unsolicited consumer and business opinions by capturing online conversations.
Monitoring of social conversation typically includes analyzing commonly mentioned words or phrases. However, KS&R’s SIX believes brands could be missing out on a significant part of the conversation – emojis. This raises an important question: Should companies include emojis while promoting brand awareness on social media?
It’s no secret that Netflix’s latest series, Fuller House, created a large buzz on social media. With over 3 million mentions in the past few months, social conversation about Fuller House continues to climb. The number of social comments with a positive net sentiment about the show far exceed those with negative sentiment.
Words like ‘love’, ‘good’ and ‘excited’ come up most often during social conversation about Fuller House – but what are social users saying with their emojis? A portion of the social conversation includes at least one emoji.
KS&R’s SIX analyzed the most commonly used emojis during social conversation related to Fuller House. Many of them appear to characterize love, laughter and excitement. After some deeper investigations, the ‘sad’ faces are not necessarily negative, but appear to be linked to nostalgia or empathy, such as…
- ‘Max on Fuller House is the cutest thing ’
- ‘Omg I love Fuller House I want a kid like Max lol’
It is clear that emojis represent a real opportunity for companies to quickly and effectively add another avenue to relay their brand message – which could make it easier for consumers to connect with the brand.
The analysis done by KS&R’s SIX also highlights the importance of including emojis in the evaluation of a brand on social media.
However, using surrounding words to uncover the intended meaning of emojis that, at first glance, mean something else is a key part of this social analysis. For example, the ‘crying face’ emoji typically conveys sadness, but in this context, we discovered that it is related to empathy. Without this inclusion of emojis in social analysis, brands could be missing out on the full picture.
