Twitter is introducing emoji targeting, in an attempt to lure advertisers and create a more effective targeting. What should we expect from now on?
Twitter is getting serious about its advertising platform and is looking for every possible way to increase its monetisation, with segmentation being important when trying to narrow down a campaign’s audience.
After Ad Groups and the multiple options of targeting based on the location, the language, or even the keyword, it is now moving to emojis, introducing the so called ‘emoji keyword targeting’.
Emojis have become a new global form of online communication and people love adding them in their social interactions in order to be more expressive about a sentiment, or a topic. According to Twitter, more than 110 billion emojis have been tweeted since 2014, a number which explains why advertisers love the idea of targeting them for their campaigns.
Big news! Target emojis right from Twitter Ads https://t.co/Ksikmgi3W5
— Twitter Advertising (@TwitterAds) June 15, 2016
Twitter informed us that emoji keyword targeting aims to improve their “precise targeting capabilities to help drive deep engagement and better performance for brands.”
How does emoji-targeting help advertisers?
Emojis have become omnipresent and as people love using them, it was only a matter of time until advertisers used them as part of their marketing efforts.
‘ . .
— Domino’s Pizza (@dominos) May 12, 2015
Emoji-marketing may not be knew, with Domino’s and WWF creating very successful campaigns with it during the past year, but Twitter is now allowing advertisers to create a custom audience directly through the use of emojis and this sounds quite interesting.
We’re using #EndangeredEmoji to save real animals from extinction. Please retweet to sign up and help. pic.twitter.com/hX1p1GEDZ9
— WWF (@WWF) May 12, 2015
People use emojis in order (Read more...) express a feeling, a preference, a passion, a reaction that written communication may not always reflect and it’s a great opportunity for advertisers to deepen their targeting capabilities during a campaign.
For example, a user that posts a pizza emoji can be targeted by a local pizza shop as part of the perfect audience for the next promotional offer. Or else, a user posting a football emoji may be perfect for a sports brand, while the use of a smiling emoji may indicate the user’s mood and the probability of being closer to a purchasing decision.
Great opportunity for brands✌
Many brands have already included emojis in their social posts, but the idea of advertising depending on the emojis that people use takes targeting to the next level, both about the chances of effectiveness, but also about the changing form of communication.
Advertisers understand how internet changed the way we communicate and emojis have been widely used during the past years, which means that brands have to follow and adapt to the changing times.
The use of emojis on tweets has seen an increase of 79% between Q4 2014 and Q4 2015 and Twitter is allowing advertisers to reach an audience that goes beyond written communication to express an opinion.
Image source: Socialbakers
This may be a great opportunity for many campaigns to become as targeted as possible, although success cannot be guaranteed for every occasion.
The challenge of targeting emojis
How can you tell whether an emoji is used ironically? Can emojis bring you to the right audience, when someone posts for example 10 emojis in just one tweet?
There are many challenges about the idea of emoji targeting and the most important one has to do with finding the right audience from the use of each emoji. If a campaign fails in targeting the right audience, people won’t be happy with irrelevant messages and this may be even worse if they are indeed the right group, but the targeting becomes too obvious.
It is important for Twitter’s targeting to have a balance and advertisers need to be very careful before creating an emoji targeting campaign, in order to be fully aware of the reasons that make people pick each emoji as part of their social posts.
Before we examine the results of the first emoji-targeting campaigns, Twitter reminds us that there is a World Emoji Day coming up on July 17 and you’re all invited to host an Emoji Party!
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