It’s not a secret anymore that people love emoji, and social media channels know this.
Recently, Facebook introduced ‘Reactions’ in part as a response to the way in which people were already using those little smiley faced images on their platform, while Instagram released a report last year which showed that nearly half of all text on the platform now contains emoji in some form.
Doesn’t want to get behind the race, Twitter is starting to get into the emoji game. The good news is, of all the social media platforms, Twitter’s format probably makes it best suited to emoji. The 140-character limit requires more creativity in how you communicate, so anything that can make it easier to convey your meaning in fewer words is beneficial – which is exactly what emoji facilitate.
Twitter users’ interest in emoji is reflected in the numbers – the platform recently reported that More than 110 billion emoji have been tweeted since 2014, and, like Facebook’s Reactions, Twitter’s made its own changes to work with this trend, most notably in the switch from a ‘star’ to a ‘heart’ icon for ‘favorite’ last year. And again, part of the motivation behind that was the fact that the heart was already one of the most used emoji on the platform.
Given this, and given Twitter’s need to get more people interested and involved with the platform, today’s announcement comes as little surprise.
From now on, you’ll be able to add emoji-like stickers to your photos when you post them to Twitter via your mobile device.
Of course, people have been able to do similar on other platforms for some time. With Snapchat, you can even put stickers on your video posts and have them move and scale as the video plays. However, this improvement should be a good step for Twitter to face the more and more competitive battle ahead.