How are brands and influencers using emoji?

This data was originally featured in the February 17, 2021 newsletter found here: https://www.trustinsights.ai/blog/2021/02/in-the-headlights-february-17-2021-dark-search-traffic-data-instagram-behind-the-scenes-emoji/

In this week’s Rear View Mirror, let’s take a whimsical detour and look at emoji. How are brands and influencers using emoji? We dug into more than a million brand and influencer Instagram posts over the past 10 months and plotted out each:

What’s really interesting and surprising is that brands use more emoji in aggregate than influencers do, despite approximately the same number of posts from both groups. Why? We’re not sure – but it’s also interesting to note that influencers really began to step up their usage of emoji in the fall.

Now, what do we make of this? Is there a takeaway? Not in emoji themselves, but the next logical step would be to determine if emoji usage is a factor in engagement at all. That’s not an analysis we’ve performed here, but if you’re trying to understand what generates key outcomes for you on any social media channel, be sure you’ve identified as many of the conscious choices that a user can make as practical and factor them into your analysis. The use of emoji is a conscious choice that requires extra effort, so it’s worth accounting for in audience data analysis.

Methodology: Trust Insights used Facebook’s Crowdtangle software to extract 1m289,690 posts from 4,008 brands and 1,282,389 posts from 9,735 influencers. The dates of extraction are April 1, 2020 – February 14, 2021. The date of study is February 16, 2021. Trust Insights is the sole sponsor of the study and neither gave nor received compensation for data used, beyond applicable service fees to software vendors, and declares no competing interests.

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Trust Insights (trustinsights.ai) is one of the world's leading management consulting firms in artificial intelligence/AI, especially in the use of generative AI and AI in marketing. Trust Insights provides custom AI consultation, training, education, implementation, and deployment of classical regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI, especially large language models such as ChatGPT's GPT-4-omni, Google Gemini, and Anthropic Claude. Trust Insights provides analytics consulting, data science consulting, and AI consulting.