EMOJIS - A WHOLE NEW LANGUAGE
February 21, 2016
In 2015 the ‘Face with Tears of Joy’ emoji was named Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year. The contenders for the title represented the political agendas and pop culture that reigned supreme throughout the year, however all were beaten by the small digital icon. Many argued this; “an emoji isn’t even a word!” however, approximately 6 billion emojis are sent around the world every day (Arthur, 2015). Instagram also recently shared that almost half of the copy inputted on its platform contains at least one emoji. SwiftKey identified that the ‘Face with Tears of Joy’ emoji made up 20% of all the emoji’s used in the UK in 2015, and 17% of those in the US, which perhaps allows people to understand why it was chosen (Oxford Dictionaries 2015). Digiday reported: “Emojis represent a marked cultural shift in the vernacular toward a more visual form of communication, presenting brands with an opportunity to convey their messages even more creatively. For linguists, emojis add the zing to communication, going beyond the vanilla semantic part of language and making it more fun and expressive” (Arthur, 2015)
Brands are hot on
the heels of consumers, creating campaigns that feature relevant emoji icons,
releasing their own branded emoji keyboards, or generally integrated emoji
‘speak’ into their content strategies (Arthur, 2015). For example, Footlocker’s
Shoemoji keyboard, featuring 80 different sneaker emojis allows the brand's customers
to share their favourite sneakers in a visual way. The keyboard will
continually be updated as new styles hit the store, keeping it relevant. The
move has been praised, as the keyboard has resulted in a spate of downloads for
Footlocker’s new app.
The fact that an emoji was the Word of the Year in 2015 demonstrates to us the importance of them in modern communication and inspired us to use emojis more heavily throughout our Instagram copy.
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