Twitter in a recent study found that the “Face With Tears of Joy” emoji, the “word” that was chosen as Word of the Year by Oxford Dictionaries, was, in fact, the most popular emoji used on its platform. This emoji appeared in 24% of tweets and was made the most in relation to some television programs.
Female Twitters users use more emojis
Twitter’s next popular emojis were “Heart Eyes” (12%), “Crying Face” (8%) and “Prayer Hands” (6%). Younger Twitter users send the most emojis, which is not at all surprising. Of all the emoji users, 86% were 24 years old or younger, and 50% were in the age group 18-24.
Most of the tweets with emojis were posted in relation to shows around music, followed by drama, reality and family shows. The gender of emoji fans is skewed towards females. Almost 57% of women make use of at least one emoji when making TV-related tweets in comparison with 43% of males.
In a blog post, a senior data specialist at Twitter, Joe Cruise, said, “The most popular emoji is 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.”
Emojis growing popular among brands
Twitter also found that emojis are being used by a growing number of shows and brands. For instance, many shows at times use emojis in place of words. After positive feedback, brands are also investing big amounts into emojis. Along with being fun, Twitter is also starting to monetize them. In September, it created two clinking glass bottles to appear with the tweet #ShareACoke.
It has been observed that whenever Twitter users engage in an all TV-related conversation on the platform, they make frequent use of emojis. In July, there was at least one emoji included in 14% of tweets related to television, while it was just 9.8% in April 2014 – around the same time emojis first became available on Twitter.
Twitter always has television, especially live events, at its focus, and therefore, it launched a new mode of discovery and also made updates to the TV shows pages in September, which is the time of season premieres for most shows.
