An Emoji Is Worth a Thousand Words (or Dollars)

Why emojis are going to be a game changer for brands and Twitter

Marketers are almost always 6–12 months behind the trends and inevitably looking for ways to completely ruin them. As a digital marketer my job is take what you love and infiltrate it with my clients. Whether it is the keywords you are searching to find answers, hashtags or even Pokemon Go. As the world continues to rapidly shift from communicating with the written word in favor of a simple illustration, marketers are looking to find a way to report and monetize emojis for brands.

Twitter recently selected six official ad partners to pilot a new program of targeted emoji advertising on the platform. This will allow brands to connect better with users and even target people who use a food emoji. These select partners will work with clients to determine the emoji they want to use, followed by standard targeting including location, age and gender. Twitter ad parter HYFN claims that the emoji-based campaigns they are running on Twitter are earning between two and ten times the engagement as other ads for clients. From a marketing standpoint this is great, but I believe that the focus on ROI is short sighted. There is more there.

The untapped, and frankly obvious, win for this program is the ability to track sentiment and interests from current and potential future fans. As someone who has been struggling with the easiest way to track sentiment on social media monitoring for years, let’s face it algorithms and sarcasm don’t work well together, the emergence of emojis has lead for less room for double meaning or a grey area.

For example, if someone uses a crying emoji you can understand that they are upset, if they use an eyeroll emoji they are being sarcastic or if they use a football emoji you know that person likes football. These tiny images provide so much context and a deeper understanding of users that could have been more difficult to get with only the written word.

While Twitter has yet to get into the business of fully monetizing emojis, which could look much like how Google has monetized search terms, I believe that this announcement sets the framework for such an option to happen. With Twitter’s recent struggles with users , revenue and leadership, it just makes sense that finding a way to profit from emoji culture is an obvious move to help turn the ship around.