Twitter users may want to begin watching what sort of social media shorthand they use after the company announced Wednesday that advertisers can now target users according to their emoji use.
Emoji keyword targeting, as Twitter calls its latest feature, enables companies to pick and choose which of the platform’s roughly 310 million users see their ads depending on how they use the tiny icons and emblems.
“Emojis have become a ubiquitous way for people, publishers and brands to express their feelings,” said Neil Shah, product manager for Twitter’s ADs API division. “This new feature uses emoji activity as a signal of a person’s mood or mindset — unlocking unique opportunities for marketers.”
Tweets containing a pizza slice emoji, for example, may result in that user seeing ads in their timeline from the likes of Domino’s or Pizza Hut; frequent usage of the “martini glass” icon in other instances may warrant an influx of ads from local bars and restaurants; plumbing companies, meanwhile, may choose to have their promotions pushed to Twitter users who rely on the tiny toilet emoji more often than others.
Twitter said the new feature also takes note of which emojis users interact with, meaning advertisers may set their sights on account holders who don’t use emojis, but engage with others who do.
Over 110 billion emojis have been tweeted since 2014, and the Oxford Dictionary went a far as to make one of them its Word of the Year in 2015, Mr. Shah acknowledged in a blog post where the feature was announced this week.
When the ’face with tears of joy’ emoji was named Word of the Year, President of Oxford Dictionaries Casper Grathwohl said the decision exemplified “how traditional alphabet scripts have been struggling to meet the rapid-fire, visually focused demands of 21st-century communication.”
“It’s not surprising that a pictographic script like emoji has stepped in to fill those gaps — it’s flexible, immediate and infuses tone beautifully,” he said at the time.
Twitter already provided services that allow advertisers to target users based off of language, gender, interests, followers, keywords and other metrics prior to this week’s announcement. Last month, Google began allowing users to conduct search queries using emojis in addition to keywords and phrases.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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