Will Emoji Drive Your Twitter Engagement?

Marketing experts recommend using emoji in tweets, but does the principle hold true for publishing houses on Twitter?

Anyone with experience running a brand’s social media presence knows that a consistent voice and a solid brand identity are standard features of good social media marketing practice. Twitter and its userbase are known to be particularly receptive to a personified, casual brand identity. Appearing like a regular person—someone easy to interact with, someone who wants to talk to you—can and does drive engagement on Twitter. In the pursuit of building a brand’s personality on Twitter, those behind the scenes recommend that marketers use emoji in their brands’ tweets.

But is this actually effective for every brand? Can emojis drive engagement on social media for corporations like publishing houses?

I wanted to find out. So, I reviewed the 25 most recent original tweets from each of the Big Five publishers—Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, and Hachette—and collected some data on how these publishers use emoji and how it impacts their engagement. (For the purpose of my analysis, engagement refers to the sum total of likes, retweets, and replies on a singular tweet.)

I first calculated the average engagement for all 25 of each publisher's tweets, and I then calculated the engagement for tweets that used emoji. The results are below:

As you can see, the engagement goes up with tweets using emoji for every single one of the Big Five publishers. Of course, not all brand identities are the same; emoji aren’t the secret to immediate engagement, and they should be used in line with the brand’s established presence. But the data is clear– using emoji is a useful way to get your Twitter audience to stop and interact with you, and if you aren’t using them now, you might want to consider it.

For a helpful guide on how to use emoji in your brand’s tweets, click here.