1. Consider whether or not you should use emojis at all.

Emojis are likely to be appropriate for your brand if you work in fashion, sports, music, or any other sort of entertainment.

However, if you’re providing a more serious service, you’re more likely to miss the point.

Imagine looking for funeral services and being greeted by a crying emoji. Imagine looking for financial aid and seeing businesses tweeting photographs of money bags.

Goldman Sachs, a global financial bank, is an excellent example of a brand that isn’t suited to heavy emoji usage. This tweet didn’t go over too well:

Before employing emojis for marketing, remember to take a step back and examine your brand’s individuality.

2. Use emojis sparingly.

So you’ve given it some idea and decided that emojis are a good fit for the brand voice your firm is trying to achieve.

Next, make sure you’re doing it in moderation. Businesses are increasingly overdoing it with their usage of emojis, according to 59 percent of all 18- to 34-year-olds.

Emoji overuse may be found all over the place. A subreddit called r/fellowkids (named after the 30 Rock clip above) has over 350,000 members and is dedicated to mocking firms who fail to communicate effectively with young people.

Overuse of emojis and memes that miss the mark is one of the most common complaints on the subreddit, with these postings generating thousands of scathing comments every day.

Using so many emojis in your social media marketing will come out as forced, unpleasant, or simply unclear. Here’s a Chevrolet extreme example:

Although the #ChevyGoesEmoji campaign was intended to be humorous, busy customers who received this newsletter didn’t have time to enjoy the subtle satire and were instead confused by the cluttered, ambiguous message.

3. Double-check that you understand what they’re saying.

Don’t use it if you don’t know what an emoji implies. We’re not just talking about emojis that make you baffled, like

Consider emojis to be visual slang: if you use them without the appropriate social context, you’ll come to seem as out of touch, if not outright wrong. Take, for example, the iconic peach emoji:

If you’re wondering whether an emoji has a different meaning, search for it on Google or look it up on Emojipedia first.

Don’t forget to check out the total list of 230 new emojis in the Unicode Consortium’s 2019 final list.

4. Emojis should not be used to confuse your message.

Emojis can add a fun, whimsical touch to your message, but they aren’t a substitute for the message itself. Emojis should not be used to replace significant words because they will often obscure what you’re attempting to express.

Take, for example, the Tampico juice brand. It’s nearly impossible to tell out what the emojis are supposed to signify in this situation:

Emojis are more of a decorative element or a tool to emphasize a point than a means of communication. This is a better example of how to use emojis correctly:

The trumpet emoji does not take the place of any words or sentences in this context. It complements Smithsonian’s informed, serious marketing voice and draws attention to the tweet’s main point.

Use emojis to highlight essential concepts or images from your message rather than replacing the message itself when utilizing them for social media marketing.

5. Select a few important emojis to represent your brand.

Pick one to five emojis relevant to your brand and start regularly utilizing them in your posts. Your brand language will be more consistent, and you’ll avoid using more cryptic emojis.

The most significant advantage is that customers will begin to link your brand with those emojis whenever they encounter them.

By ‘branding’ existing emojis in this way, you can encourage customers to think of you even when you aren’t promoting to them.

McDonald’s, for example, recently executed a high-concept marketing campaign centered on how consumers identify their brand with emojis.

They photographed their actual products made to seem like emojis, illustrating how their burgers, fries, and sodas have such a distinctive design that they affect even emojis.