We are living in an era where we are taking emojis rather seriously. They have transcended from their use in messaging apps to pop culture like in press releases, passwords and even starring in an upcoming movie. This has become so serious to the point that Oxford Dictionaries, one of the most respected dictionaries named a certain emoji the Word of the Year. How crazy was that!
You may think we have reached peak emoji but the emoji gods are not done with us yet. Twitter, a popular social network in its own right decided to venture in an interesting project: emoji targeting.
Twitter has over 310 million active users on its platform and they tweet emojis of various forms and this in itself could be an interesting data source for ads. Now the company will allow advertisers to create ads that will target tweets that feature emojis. Apparently according to the company, the use of emojis is being used to “signal a person’s mood or mindset” which will create an interesting angle for marketers. Advertisers will be able to target people who use for example food emojis or if they use emojis to express sentiment. What this means is that if you use the pizza emoji, you will probably see a targeted ad from a brand that will try to convince you to engage with them.
This strategy is not entirely new. Facebook launched their Reaction emojis which are a bunch of emojis that extend from the like button so that people could add sentiment to a post. The data generated by people using them is used by Facebook and advertisers to further personalize your news feed so the move by Twitter to use them is continuing this trend of you being targeted by your emoji use.
