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Should publishers use emojis

on Facebook?
A data-driven analysis of how emojis impact Facebook traffic

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Foreword Follow us on

Antoine Amann
Founder & CEO, Echobox

Ever since Echobox was founded in 2013, our goal has been to use the latest innovations in
artificial intelligence to offer publishers the best social media solution on the market.

We're proud to say that over 1,000 leading publishers around the world rely on Echobox for
their day-to-day social media scheduling. What's more, over 50% of all posts we make are
fully automated using the Echobox Autofeed.

A lot of research takes place at Echobox every day. Our principal aim is to save our clients
valuable time whilst growing their audiences. We've engineered Echobox from the ground up
specifically for publishers.

We pride ourselves on our strong focus on science-driven innovation. Our technical advisor,
Prof. Zoubin Ghahramani, heads up Uber's artificial intelligence unit after having led the
Engineering Department at the University of Cambridge. Our CTO, Dr Marc Fletcher,
completed his PhD in Quantum Physics, also at the University of Cambridge. His research
team consists of some of the most talented researchers in the field.

These reports aim to share findings that have helped to guide elements of our product
innovation. We hope you find them useful and we're always happy to hear your feedback and
thoughts.

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Summary and recommendations

Following numerous requests from publishers around the world, we placed emojis under the
microscope with the aim of answering a very simple question: should publishers include
emojis in their Facebook posts?

Our study revealed the following:

● Posts that include emojis drive more traffic than those which don’t
● 1 emoji is the optimum number
● Posts with emojis placed at the end perform better than those with emojis at the
beginning or the middle
● Direction emojis (⬇) appear to work best - perhaps due to the fact that they relate to,
or encourage, action on behalf of the reader, i.e. ‘click here’

Recommendations

Our study suggests that using emojis has a beneficial impact on driving referral traffic. Using
one emoji (preferably a direction symbol such as an arrow) at the end of a post produces
appreciably better results than placing it earlier in the post, or using zero or multiple emojis.
Our research further suggests that emojis have the greatest positive impact when they
communicate a clear action to the reader.

While our findings tell one part of the story, publishers working to optimise a well defined
social media strategy will be best served by a whole toolbox of insight and analysis.

Our online library of white papers and case studies provides a valuable set of resources for
publishers keen to gain an advantage over secretive social media algorithms. From learning
how reposting existing shares to Facebook can be an excellent way to boost traffic, to
proven methods for saving costs in the midst of the global pandemic, Echobox has
developed a wealth of techniques to help publishers get the most from social media.

Analysing one’s own data can be forbiddingly complex for publishers. With this in mind,
Echobox’s innovative AI technology is capable of parsing vast datasets to produce actionable
results. Echobox is the first social media publishing platform conceived specifically with
publishers in mind, and designed bespoke to their requirements.

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Introduction

Social media has presented publishers with a unique opportunity. An entire generation of
readers use Facebook as their primary social platform to access the news. As such, the
question is: how can publishers reach the greatest number of people and derive the most
traffic from their content?

Since their inception in the 90s, emojis have become a ubiquitous presence on social media,
and the last few years has seen a steady increase in the number of publishers who have
begun adding them to their own posts. Publishers have been looking for different ways to
engage with their audience, and have experimented with the presentation of their content
over different platforms, especially where these platforms have differing audience
demographics. To this end, in 2015, The Guardian produced an emoji translation of Barack
Obama’s State of the Union address, while, in the same year USA Today brought emojis to
their front page.

Emojis perform a unique function in conveying meaning in the digital space. As noted in the
journal Frontiers in Psychology, “because they are non-verbal cues with rich emotional
meanings, emoji are an important medium for interaction and emotional communication
on the Internet.” This tallies with our intuitive understanding of how emojis are used: they can
enrich text with colour and convey a more conversational tone. For the purposes of this
study, we develop this idea into a distinct proposal which will help to better frame our
research. We propose that emojis can help to elicit a response from readers in a way in which
text alone cannot, and therefore, emojis will increase Facebook traffic.

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Methodology and research

We set out to answer four main questions:

1. Should publishers add emojis to share messages?

2. What is the optimal number of emojis?
3. Which types of emoji perform better?
4. Where should emojis be positioned?

In order to produce statistically meaningful data, our research was conducted using all
Facebook shares from circa 1,000 news publishers worldwide, posted over a 6 month period in
English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Greek, Arabic and Dutch. This produced a total of 5
million posts, of which just under 6% included at least 1 emoji. Finally, to analyse the
performance of these posts, we measured referral traffic from Facebook (represented in the
following graphs as the “Change in Pageviews”). The data in this study is denormalised and
performance was calculated against a baseline determined by the average number of
pageviews from shares without emojis.

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Should publishers add emojis to share messages?

Using emojis can be a complicated topic for publishers, where growing visibility online may
demand different considerations than have previously been applied to print. Over the last few
years the use of emojis has become widespread, with the World Economic Forum estimating
that 5 billion emojis are used each day on Facebook and Facebook Messenger. But what
effect do they have on whether people click on a publisher’s post or not?

Analysing the data, we found that publishers should include emojis in Facebook posts, with
those posts outperforming those that didn’t feature emojis by an increase of 29% in
pageviews.

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What is the optimal number of emojis?

Following from this, what is the optimal number of emojis publishers should include in a
message? Is it the case, for example, that 2 is better than 1? Might 3 be the magic number?

Our analysis showed that the optimal number of emojis used is 1, with the inclusion of each
subsequent emoji leading to a steady degradation in pageviews.

Including too many emojis is detrimental based on the above data, with posts featuring 3 or
more emojis performing worse than those with none at all. We speculate that this may be to
do with creating an uncluttered visual format that is clear and concise for the reader.

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Which types of emoji perform better?

We considered which types of emojis performed best and which performed worst. Accepted
wisdom states that emojis are a way of stimulating emotional engagement with content. So,
do smiley faces perform best? Given the extraordinary number of emojis available (over 3,000
on Facebook alone) we grouped the emojis featured in the posts we studied into 4 distinct
categories:

● Activities (🏀 🎉 🎲)
● Symbols (⬇ 🚫 📶)
● Smileys and Emotions (😍 😊 🤭)
● People and Body (👋 👀 🙏)

Our analysis concluded that the best-performing group of emojis, by far, were the symbols
category. Activity emojis were the clear worst performer.

Further, of the most commonly used emojis in the posts analysed, we found that the most
successful emoji was the ‘downward-pointing arrow’ (⬇). Surprisingly, other arrows
performed significantly worse, even if those arrows were pointed in the same direction and
conceivably perform the same function. The ‘right arrow curving down’ (↷), for example,
actually produced a negative effect on traffic.

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Of these seven most commonly used emojis, there was an even distribution of positive and
negative results with the ‘down arrow’, ‘warning’ and ‘red heart’ all producing a positive effect
on referral traffic, whilst the ‘right arrow curving down’ the ‘right arrow’ and the ‘soccer ball’
produced negative results when compared against the baseline. The ‘male sign’ produced no
appreciable effect whatsoever, positive or negative.

The results obtained from our tests only include emojis which were used often enough to
produce statistically meaningful data. That said, of these symbols which most frequently
appeared in our studied posts, we speculate that the down arrow produces significantly
higher levels of referral traffic due to its easy legibility and the fact that it guides a reader to a
preferred desirable course of action (for example, ‘click here’). It may be that the emoji’s bright
colour and boldness enable it to better stand out from the proximate text, a fact which may
explain its superior performance relative to the other downward arrow. This would also partly
explain the results for the other two emojis whose performance in effecting referral traffic
was positive (‘warning’ and ‘red heart’), both of which are strong primary colours.

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Where should emojis be positioned?

If a single direction emoji is optimal, where in the text should it be placed? In the concluding
part of our study, we categorised emojis based on where they appeared in the message. By
analysing the data, we found that emojis placed at the end of a post perform significantly
better than those placed at the beginning, while placing emojis in the middle of a post
actually had a negative effect on pageviews.

This supports our previous finding that emojis can be more useful in directing the audience to
carry out a given action than they are in provoking emotional responses.

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Conclusion

From this study, we have derived a set of principles that can be combined to form best
practice: Posts that include emojis perform better than those that don’t. Added to this, we
have discovered that for the greatest impact, posts should include only one emoji, preferably
a direction symbol, placed at the end of the post. Also, our analysis suggests that the impact
of emojis on a reader’s emotions may not be sufficient to motivate engagement with content;
emojis that provide clear instructions for action can be more effective in eliciting
click-throughs, with the blue, downward-pointing arrow particularly effective.

This does not mean, of course, that publishers should include emojis on every message they
post. An individual post’s ability to drive traffic will depend on a variety of factors in addition
to emoji usage, including post topic, format, timing and spacing. Echobox automatically
optimises all of these factors through cutting-edge AI that reverse-engineers Facebook’s
algorithm to find which posts will perform best at any given moment. Echobox’s A/B Testing
allows publishers to discover the best way to format their content, including how
incorporating emojis in their posts impacts their click-through rates.

Whether or not emojis form part of your editorial strategy on Facebook, you can analyse how
effectively your posts drive traffic with our free Facebook Grader. Simply enter your
publication’s Facebook Page URL into the Grader and receive an instant analysis of your share
spacing, volume and timing.

For more information, tips and ideas on how to get the most from your social media strategy,
visit our Echobox Resources page.

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Learn more

Check out additional research from Echobox:

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About Echobox

Echobox is a fast-growing, research-focused technology company. We build innovative

technology driven by artificial intelligence that helps online publishers excel in their digital
strategies.

Over 1,000 leading publishers around the world share over ten million posts and reach billions
of people with Echobox each year.

The Echobox team consists of leading academics in the fields of machine learning and data
science, as well as a forward-thinking commercial team dedicated to their clients.

Echobox currently offers five innovative solutions for helping publishers grow their audiences
on social media, as well as save valuable time.

Echobox Augment
The only social media publishing solution using novel AI techniques to increase traffic for
publishers by an average of +36% (the Echobox Effect).

Echobox Automate
The original “intelligent” automation solution for social. Automate currently shares over half a
million posts a month without human input.

Echobox A/B Testing

The world’s first organic A/B Testing solution for publishers on Facebook.

Echobox Analytics
The complete social media analytics dashboard for publishers.

Echobox API
The fast and reliable API that integrates into a publisher’s internal systems.

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Join over 1,000 leading publishers on Echobox

CONTACT US

Follow us on

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