Do you like to use Emojis during online conversations? Emojis have made our conversations more interesting and colorful. The Emoji word comes from Japanese where ‘e’ means picture and ‘Moji’ means character. People sometimes confuse emojis with emoticons, but they are different. Emoticons are created by using keyboard characters. The emojis include facial expressions and postures and they can lighten up any conversation. Slowly, with time emojis have become an integral part of everyone’s day-to-day communication.
The use of Emojis has become so common that the Oxford dictionary named the ‘Face with tears of joy emoji as the word of the year 2015. This clearly shows the popularity of emojis in recent times. Over 90 percent of internet users regularly use emojis and this shows how important they are for communication. Emojis have become a fundamental part of social media or different messaging platforms like WhatsApp, Messenger, etc. They are fun and you can easily convey your emotions efficiently with the help of them. Emojis have become so popular that every year July 17th is celebrated as World Emoji Day. Now, let’s learn a little bit more about the history of emojis.
The History of Emojis
In the year 1999, a Japanese interface designer named Shigetaka Kurita created the first set of 176 emojis for popular Japanese internet platform i-mode that worked under the mobile carrier NTT Docomo. After seeing the popularity of emoticons, Microsoft introduced 30 new emoticons to MSN messenger in the year 2003. In 2007, Google incorporated emojis into Gmail and they also introduced a unified set of code points for each emoji.
Apple released their own images with the release of iOS version 2.2 in the year 2008. Apple added an emoji keyboard in iOS 5 that helped users to easily access emojis. The emojis have been continuously evolving from time to time. For example, in 1999 the set of emojis included icons for weather, time, traffic, and technology. In 2010, various cat face emojis that showed happiness, anger, and tears were added. The emojis became more diverse when five new skin tones were added in 2015. In reference to the Covide-19 pandemic, new emojis were released that illustrate wearing protective gear and maintaining social distancing.
Types of Emojis
Communication between people is becoming more digital. People spend a lot of time on social media platforms, text messages, e-mails, etc. With emojis, you can add an emotional level to any conversation, and it can help in preventing any misunderstanding. Emojis are not only facial expressions but they can also depict emojis, hand gestures, etc. There are different types of emojis that you can use on different platforms and in different ways. Some of the various types of emojis are,
1) Social Media Emojis
Emojis can play a huge role in social media for marketing purposes. Using emojis you can connect with the customer and become more creative. It is easily noticeable, and you can stand apart from the crowd by adding a fun quotient to the message using emojis. You must use emojis carefully and smartly otherwise they can impact your brand negatively. First, you need to make sure that the emojis you are using makes sense.
Never overuse emojis and just keep them natural because overusing them might feel forced. Before using any emojis you need to make sure what the emojis mean. If you know the meaning of every emoji then you can use it more effectively on social media platforms. According to a study by WordStream, using an emoji can significantly increase your engagement and interaction on Twitter and Facebook. A lot of people use emojis on social media to convey messages to their friends and in the same way, brands can also use it to their advantage.
2) Text Emojis
The use of emojis is very common among youngsters. Emojis become very essential to use in text messages because normally there is a character limit on text messages. So, it becomes very difficult to include everything in a text message which is why emojis become very important. Emojis keep the conversation more interesting and entertaining. Some of the most common emojis used in friendly conversations on text messages are smiling emojis, face with tears of joy, smiling face with heart-shaped eyes, fingers crossed, clapping hands, angry faces, etc.
3) Smileys and People
Smileys are not limited to only one emoji. There are numerous smileys, and every emoji has a different meaning. Some of the smileys that you can use regularly are smiling face with an open mouth, grinning face with smiling eyes, face with tears of joy, smiling face with a halo, upside-down smiling face, winking face, relieved face, smiling face with heart eyes, smiley licking the corner of the mouth with tongue, etc. Every smiley is different and has a unique meaning and you cannot use them in the same place. Similarly, there are various people emojis that include baby, boy, girl, woman, man, etc. Other than that, there are various emojis like a guardsman, builder, detective, etc.
4) Symbols
There are different symbols in emojis like hearts, clocks, shapes & signs, arrows, etc. In emojis, you can see different colors of heart, sparkling heart, beating heart, revolving hearts, etc. There are different symbols of the clock that shows a different time. Various other symbols are zodiac signs, mathematical signs, play or pause button, next button, stop button, and many more.
5) Animals and Nature
In this section, you can see emojis of flowers, trees, fish, leaves, animals, etc. There are different animals face and animal emojis like dog face, cat face, mouse face, bear, panda, monkey, eagle, owl, fish, tiger, etc. You can use emojis of cactus, Christmas tree, palm tree, four-leaf clover, mushroom, maple leaf, flowers, etc. There is also a lot of nature emojis like the sun behind clouds, rainy clouds, thunderstorms, rainbow, etc.
6) Food and Drink
You can use a lot of food and drink emojis in any conversation as there are a lot of them available. There are a lot of fruits emojis like green apple, red apple, banana, watermelon, strawberry, mangos, grapes, etc. Different other foods and drink emojis that you can use are French fries, a slice of pizza, cooked rice, cake, beer mugs, champagne, cocktail glass, etc.
These are different types of emojis that you can use in your daily conversations and on social media platforms to increase engagement.