Best practices for supercharging campaigns with branded emojis

Brands’ usage of emojis on Twitter and beyond has skyrocketed to the tune of a 461% year-over-year increase. There’s a good reason why: Those little smileys and hearts elicit warm and fuzzy feelings towards the brands that use them, recent eMarketer research has found. On Twitter, brands can design custom branded emojis that are triggered when a specific hashtag is used. 

To better understand how branded emojis can benefit your campaign, we share research and tips for using branded emojis in your next campaign.

Research proves branded emojis help you stand out

We know people quickly move through their timeline and a Tweet needs to stand out to get attention. We call this “stopping power” and branded emojis help marketers achieve it. The amount of attention ads receive increases by almost 10% when branded emojis are included in the ad¹.

When branded emojis are paired with a promoted video, the emotional connection and interest in the ad increases 6x, as people are more focused on the ad.

Further, campaigns with branded emojis extend a brand’s presence across Twitter in a way that is personal and authentic to the brand. In fact, the median number of earned media generated is 5.3 million Tweet impressions, representing a 420% increase compared to the earned media baseline².
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Major brands are seeing great success

For @SamsungMobile's launch of the Samsung Galaxy S7, the company designed and released a custom branded emoji of the Gear VR headset that appeared when someone Tweeted with #TheNextGalaxy hashtag.

The campaign, with the objective of driving conversation and brand mentions, launched at Mobile World Congress and ran in 50-plus countries across the globe. By developing a branded emoji and leveraging additional ad formats, like conversational ads, Samsung was able to achieve a 75% year-over-year increase in usage of #TheNextGalaxy hashtag. On launch day, conversation hit a high of 600 Tweets per minute and was 99% positive or neutral in terms of sentiment.

When the Beatles catalogue launched on @Spotify and eight other streaming services, Spotify developed a branded emoji to go with their #BeatlesOnSpotify hashtag to reach as many consumers as they could, and stand out from the competition.

The branded emoji resulted in more than 50 million total impressions through the campaign and the #BeatlesOnSpotify was mentioned 4x more frequently than the #Beatles hashtag. Additionally, Spotify bested the competition with an 83% share of conversation at launch. This led to an increase of 6.5 million listeners in the first 100 days of the Beatles catalogue, which equated to 2,000 years’ worth of Beatles music streamed on Spotify during that time period.

Best practices for your next campaign

Now that you’ve read the research and reviewed successful brand campaigns, it’s time to plan for your next campaign. Here are four recommendations to help you use branded emojis:

1. Focus your Tweet around the emoji and the hashtag. The copy should be short and engaging.
2. Inspire people to Tweet the hashtag by making it easy to remember and giving them an incentive.
3. Educate your audience on how you want them to use the emoji. Should they Retweet it or answer a question, or are you inviting a discussion? Inspire conversation and engagement by leading the way.
4. Combine your emoji with an engaging, shareable video. Videos are six times more likely to be Retweeted than photos and three times more likely than GIFs, so combine emojis and video to boost your expected results.