Everyday Data Vis — Emoji Reactions
I’m a bit of a stats nerd. I track a lot about my life — my sleep patterns, my mood, and lots of other little bits and pieces that I think could be interesting — because I love that I can find out more about myself and use that information to possibly improve my life. I also just really, really like charts.
So as a little side project to introduce a little more stats into my life, I’ll be tracking something (it’s a mystery!) every month so that I can maybe uncover something interesting. Or not. This is my first attempt, so it could be all downhill from here.
For July, I decided to track how people react to my messages with emojis. I tracked across two Slack groups — the A Cloud Guru Slack (where I work!) as well as the United Designers Slack, which is a community group for design lovers. I also tracked any reactions on Facebook Messenger.
What I tracked
- How many times particular emojis were used to react to my messages on a daily basis
- How that was spread across the three platforms
What I didn’t track
- Who (individually) reacted to my messages
- The nature of my message (image, text, question, etc)
- Any replies that were just emojis — that is, I only counted things if they used the ‘react’ functionality.
There were a lot of emojis.
Specifically, over 31 days, my messages were reacted to 572 times, which is about 18 reactions per day, and 82 emojis were used. 27 of those emojis were only ever used a single time.
Because the list was long, I’ve only showed the top 12 emoji reactions here:
Fun facts about the total emoji reactions
- The majority of emoji reactions were used on a single platform only. Facebook only has 7 reactions, which gives it a bit of a pass, but since both Slacks have the entire emoji library I expected more overlap. Only 2 emojis were used across all 3 platforms (😍 and 👍), and only 8 emojis were used across 2 platforms (😂 ❤️ 🤔 🔥 😮 😬 and 🙏).
- 28 of the emojis used were completely custom. 2 of them were Pokémon themed, and 4 were the face of one of my coworkers. (It was his birthday.)
- 7 of the single-reaction emojis were just objects that were related to what I was saying instead of an actual emotion. For example, 🥔.
It’s kind of predictable.
I only tracked emojis for a month, but a pattern was already pretty obvious in terms of days of the week.
On this daily chart of the three platforms, you can see that both Slack groups follow a pretty similar pattern where they peak in the middle and then dip. The ACG (A Cloud Guru) Slack is almost always completely reactionless on weekends, but is fairly active during the week when I’m actually working.
The UD (United Designers) Slack is similar but offset by about a day. Most activity happens during the working week, but the majority of users are based in the US, and so aren’t particularly active on my Monday. There are also way more reactions on that Slack group than my work one. It could be that I’m just a bit more talkative on there, or that that group is more reaction-happy. Or both!
Facebook is fairly steady and quiet, since I don’t talk to many people on there.
The day of the week breakdown really just makes this a bit clearer. Apparently Wednesdays are just super talky for me!
The weekends are very quiet — I (surprisingly?) am not super active on Slack on the weekends. Facebook is also really quiet on the weekends, usually because I’m with my partner and he’s the one who does most of the emoji reacting.
It’s all happy.
Well, mostly.
To get a better idea of the sentiments behind the emoji reactions, I grouped as many as I could into 7 reaction categories, based on the 7 Facebook reactions, so as to not unfairly represent it.
The categories I came up with were:
- Love: 😍 ❤️ 🙌 👏
- Laugh: 😆 😂
- Surprise: 😮
- Sad: 😢 😞 😦 + worryhug
- Angry: 😠 + worrysmash + worryangry
- Agree: 👍 👌 👆 ☝️ 💯 + worryneat + same + 100000000
- Dislike: 👎 + no
I included emojis that had shown up in the 31 days, including any custom emojis that I felt fit the category. There were also a few emojis that had been used ambiguously (🔥 for example was either ‘love’ or ‘burn’ depending on the context) so I opted to keep them out.
Supportive coworkers make for a good time.
If there was any doubt about the kindness of the ACG office, this should dispel that. They were overwhelmingly loving in July, with 81% of reactions in that category!
Similarly, nobody ever used angry or dislike-related emojis at me the entire month. I doubt nobody’s disagreed with me for a month, so it’s probably more that they’d rather have a chat about it instead of just flat-out shutting me down.
I’m either hilarious or silly.
On the UD Slack, where the tone ranges from ridiculous to ultra-professional, there’s a bit more of a split. All 7 reaction categories were applied, and nothing held an absolute majority. Laugh was the winning category with 43% of the reactions, and it’s followed fairly closely by Agree, with 36%.
It seems fairly representative of what I talk about on there, which is usually either joking around or giving design advice.
I’m appreciated outside of work, too.
Facebook also managed to hit all 7 reaction categories, but it only touched on 5 of them. Love (45%) and Laugh (31%) were easy dominators for this platform.
They’re all unique.
Each platform pretty clearly has a different way of using emojis to the others, which means it’s pretty easy to tell where you are — regardless of the interface!
My coworkers at ACG seem to focus mostly on supporting me when they think I do well. The top 3 reactions were all used when I posted work or an accomplishment.
The UD Slack is a big departure. I don’t often post actual design work on there, but I’ll talk about design, my career, and personal life.
Facebook is a bit less varied (surprisingly, none of my friends send me stickers, so I didn’t have to worry about if that counted or not) but still a really clear representation of the personal life messages that take place there.
👏 Crushed it.
I learnt a lot this month about how my messages and posts are received by my friends and coworkers. Will I do anything with this information? Probably not. But is it cool? Definitely!
Coolest finding
Surprisingly, seeing how friendly the ACG Slack is! I love working there and I tell people often that it has a wonderfully kind and supportive environment, but I didn’t have any data on that myself.
Most difficult thing
Since I hadn’t conducted a monthly data experiment before, keeping it a secret was definitely the hardest thing. It was especially important to keep this one quiet since I knew that telling anyone would just massively skew my data!
What’s next?
I don’t think anything will be changing any time soon, but I might have to make sure I’m being as generous with my emoji reactions as everyone else is!
Thanks for reading! Give this post a 👏 if you enjoyed it, and feel free to check out A Cloud Guru (we’re always hiring!) and United Designers. And even though you can’t currently react to messages on LinkedIn, please reach out anyway! 🎉
