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Twitter rolls out emoji targeting

Why Twitter's announcement is a big deal for digital marketing.

In anticipation of World Emoji Day next month (17th July. Keep up folks), Twitter revealed this week that advertisers on the platform will be able to include emoji amongst their targeting options.

It goes without saying, emoji are a pretty big deal right now. 😂 was the Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year in 2015, Kim Kardashian supposedly rakes in $1million PER MINUTE from her own ‘Kimoji’ and Twitter themselves have said more than 110 billion emoji have been tweeted since 2010.

To be fair, most marketers have been quick to hop on the emoji bandwagon, but now Twitter is going to make it even easier to exploit those little yellow faces.

Giving advertisers the ability to target their Twitter advertising based on emoji that users tweet opens up the doors to a heap of possibilities. You can imagine fast food chains being quick to pounce on this, but it goes beyond that.

Sell bike equipment? Target users who have used or engaged with the bike emoji.  Purveyor of sun cream? Target people using the sunshine emoji. Or why not take it further and target based on phrases that include the airplane emoji and a destination, potentially scoring sales from holiday makers who need to grab those last minute essentials.

As technology and platforms, as well as user habits, change this feature is going to be crucial for advertisers. Last year, emoji was confirmed as the world’s fastest growing language and during this Monday’s unveiling of iOS 10 Apple went big (literally) with emoji. 

Not only will their new operating system display bigger emoji, but there will also be a ‘predictive’ emoji function that will suggest replacing words with characters. So, you could be typing a message – or in this case a tweet – with the word pizza and your phone suggests switching it for the pizza symbol. 

Basically, pretty soon there’s going to be even more emoji floating around and this emoji targeting will soon become as crucial to digital advertisers as keywords. 😮

Posted 15 June 2016 by Ben Waterhouse

 

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