Smiling is no more free

Swasty Jain
Oct 15, 2020
3 min read

Which language, according to you, has the fastest-growing number of “speakers”? Is it English or Spanish, Mandarin or French? Well, the answer might seem a bit amusing at first. However, given the digital age which we inhabit, the answer seems kind of predictable. It’s the language of emojis! They are small digital images which are used to express emotions and are the 21st-century successor of emoticons[ :) ;) :( ]. Not only do these emojis depict emotions but they act as punctuation as well. By sprinkling one or two emojis, one can season their texts beautifully!

In March 2020, the global count for the number of emojis, as per Unicode Consortium, was 3304. Nearly 4 billion people use emojis, which is four times the number of people speaking Mandarin! It, therefore, does not come across as a surprise when Oxford Dictionaries named ‘Face with Tears of Joy’ (😂) as its ‘Word of the Year 2015’.

Let us look at some country wise data on its usage. One might think that one of the most populous countries of the world, with 22 official languages, would use them the most to bridge language barriers. However, India lies on the lower end of the usage spectrum with less than a third of the population using emojis frequently. France tops the list with nearly 71% of users regularly sending them. It is followed by Mexico, Philippines and Brazil respectively.

Statistics reveal a 36% increase in the amount of emojis being shared since 2018 with a growth rate of 8%. For those of us who at times fail to express the bizarre nature of the world around us with our words, the existence of emojis is a blessing. A recent example of this has been the fact that the COVID-19 induced lockdown saw a 58% increase in the usage of emojis while texting. A ‘Sentiment Analysis’ of 68 million unique tweets categorized as positive, negative and others shows that exchange of emojis depicting positivity and optimism is on the decline even though the total number of emojis being shared is rising.

Figure 1: Emoji use over time

Apart from being used in communication between individuals, emojis have also entered the business arena. They play a vital role in digital marketing - Push Notification messages help to improve marketing campaigns by gaining attention. Push notifications with emojis saw a rise of 85% in the number of times being opened and a 9% bump in conversions.

Almost all brands prefer using emojis in their marketing tactics since they get instant results. Case studies of brands like Taco Bell and Domino’s using emojis as part of their marketing strategy are prominent examples. (We can now order a pizza by tweeting 🍕!). Apart from them, Coca Cola, Burger King, Mentos and IKEA developed their own emojis which helped them improve their promotional campaigns. In fact, the movie Deadpool was promoted as ‘💀💩L’! Given that people go gaga over Disney, it was only a matter of time before the brand cottoned onto the power of creating its own custom emoji keyboard.

However, a caveat is attributed to them. Exchange of emojis on the internet ought to be regulated or moderated in some sense. This is due to the fact that, while emojis may be widely used throughout the world, they are not a universal language. Cultural contexts play a key role in their interpretation. For instance, the folded hands are sometimes interpreted as a symbol for ‘high five’ while in other scenarios, it is often construed as an image depicting plea or request. Adding to the argument is the analysis that shows that frequent use of emojis makes one look unprofessional and incompetent in the workplace. Applications of job applicants were subjected to a study where it was observed that too many emojis in the subject line can cause your email to land in the spam folder.

So, what’s the bottom line? Should emojis be used formally? Or should their use be prohibited? As for now, we cannot say with certainty. However, questions arise when we consider time, setting and the person with whom we use them. As the line between personal and professional communication is increasingly getting blurred and with multiple generations in the workplace, we might soon see a shift in both the tools used by people to communicate as well as the way they communicate on a daily basis.

Sources:

Cover Image Credits: Pintrest

Smiling is no more free

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