This morning as I was oh-so-casually perusing LinkedIn, I saw a post lamenting the existence of emojis in marketing.
Now, in fairness, this post wasn’t saying that emojis shouldn’t exist anywhere, but just that they’ve rather taken over words. The argument was that, if used correctly, your words should be enough to convey your marketing message without using those handy little pictures.
I do agree that emojis have rather taken over text-based marketing. Ask AI to write any social media caption, and you’ll see at least 5 emojis in there (and there will always, always be the rocket emoji – that’s an unbreakable law).
BUT – consider this: how easy is it to relate the tone of your messaging via the written word, and ONLY the written word? The ever-wise Stephen Church of Copywriter Pro has some excellent blogs on this, which I’ll attempt to relay in short (or in clear, concise and compelling language, to borrow a Churchism!).
Tone of voice can be extremely hard to pick up from text alone. If you’re using a narrative voice, you can throw in descriptors, such as “he said, sarcastically”. But we don’t tend to do that in short-form marketing – often there’s neither the time nor the physical space, particularly when it comes to social media. We have approximately an 8-second attention span for social media posts, and we look at them on our phones or tablets, meaning graphics need to be easy to absorb at a glance – no one is going to zoom in so they can read all the text you threw on there clearly: they’ll just scroll on by, because it’s too much effort.
So, how do we relay tone in social media captions? With emojis.
Emojis can be incredibly helpful little pictograms – they convey thoughts and feelings at a glance, which is perfect for when we’re in subconscious scroll mode and not really paying deep attention to what we’re looking at.
So, go ahead and use those emojis in your social posts. Just use them sparingly, so you don’t lose the positive impact they can have on your messaging.