If you work in a communications role at a nonprofit, you probably have news and social media alerts set up for keywords relating to your organization's work - for example, a housing nonprofit might have an alert for terms like "homeless," "couch surfing," or "sleeping rough." But what if the people you're trying to reach don't use those words? What if they don't use words at all?
I've been running some experiments in emoji search, both individual and in groups that give added meaning.
The first search I conducted on Twitter was using a āhandshakeā 🤝. I was able to find posts of users who had tweeted using the same emoji. I decided to complicate the search by adding two and then three emoji together. The second search was a āhandshakeā and a ābriefcaseā. There were still a lot of results until I added the third emoji, a graduation cap. One result: a tweet about a diversity event.
Searching emoji on Facebook was less fruitful. Searching for ātrophyāĀ 🏆, I came up with three video results that had made use of that emoji in their description. Using the āfriesā emojiĀ 🍟Ā producedĀ a nacho fries recipe. On YouTube, a search for the ādonutā emojiĀ 🍩Ā resulted in a video of donut economics.
Online marketing consultant Jayson DeMers wrote in an article for Forbes last year that searching for emoji in a search engine would bring up posts that used that emoji, but also posts relating to the topic that emoji represented.
Right now, with emojis usually used as an embellishment for written text, it seems frivolous to think about emoji search or its impact on SEO, but linguists predict that emoji communication will only get more popular and perhaps may even become a language of its own.
After learning more about emoji searching on social media channels, I wondered how one could propose a new emoji or associate an emoji with their own brand. The Unicode Consortium has developed a formal process to do so.
The Oakland As found success adopting the baseball emoji. Is there an emoji that your nonprofit should use?
I've been running some experiments in emoji search, both individual and in groups that give added meaning.
The first search I conducted on Twitter was using a āhandshakeā 🤝. I was able to find posts of users who had tweeted using the same emoji. I decided to complicate the search by adding two and then three emoji together. The second search was a āhandshakeā and a ābriefcaseā. There were still a lot of results until I added the third emoji, a graduation cap. One result: a tweet about a diversity event.Searching emoji on Facebook was less fruitful. Searching for ātrophyāĀ 🏆, I came up with three video results that had made use of that emoji in their description. Using the āfriesā emojiĀ 🍟Ā producedĀ a nacho fries recipe. On YouTube, a search for the ādonutā emojiĀ 🍩Ā resulted in a video of donut economics.
Is your nonprofit optimizing for emoji search?
Online marketing consultant Jayson DeMers wrote in an article for Forbes last year that searching for emoji in a search engine would bring up posts that used that emoji, but also posts relating to the topic that emoji represented.
Right now, with emojis usually used as an embellishment for written text, it seems frivolous to think about emoji search or its impact on SEO, but linguists predict that emoji communication will only get more popular and perhaps may even become a language of its own.
After learning more about emoji searching on social media channels, I wondered how one could propose a new emoji or associate an emoji with their own brand. The Unicode Consortium has developed a formal process to do so.
The Oakland As found success adopting the baseball emoji. Is there an emoji that your nonprofit should use?
