Tips for Using Emojis as a PR Professional

Whether you love to use them or stay away, there’s one thing we can all agree on – emojis are here to stay. We’ve grown from creating make-shift smiley faces from colons and brackets on our keyboards to designing life-like Memojis that can mimic our every move. At a time when punctuation can lead to miscommunicated emotions, emojis are a solution for clarifying the feeling behind your message.  The personal use of emojis is easily explainable, but where exactly do emojis fit into the professional realm?

As a communication professional that works a lot with social media and content creation, I find myself torn when thinking about implementing emojis in my posts. What if my client sees it as unprofessional? How many emojis are too many emojis? Will my audience understand what I’m saying?

There’s no hard and fast rules for how and when to use emojis, but I can offer some helpful tips. Here are my recommended best practices for emoji usage in your professional life 

 Use emojis to break up text

Although social media posts aren’t meant to be full-length stories, sometimes you just can’t fit all the necessary content in just a few sentences. When you have to post a list of items or a paragraph of information, this is the perfect time to supplement typical bullets for an emoji to break up the text. This allows you to make your post more visually appealing.

 Don’t use emojis to eliminate words

With limited character space and shortened attention spans, adding emojis to your post can help get your message across while taking up less space. However, I don’t recommend swapping out full words with emojis. It can be tempting – I know – but there is rarely a time that an emoji describes exactly what you want it too. Just take this emoji  as an example. It is most commonly used as praying hands, but some people believe that it is actually depicting a high-five!

 Upgrade your inbox

You may have seen people using emojis in the subject line of their emails, especially in marketing emails. Is there any merit to this approach? Actually there is! A test from Swiftpage found a 29 percent increase in email open rates for emails with emojis in the subject line. But this doesn’t mean that there isn’t risk involved. Emojis can help your email stand out in the clutter of a text-filled inbox, but it can also be seen as spam or just insincere.  I recommend evaluating your brand and doing an A/B test to see if this added spice could be a key to unlocking higher email open rates.

In the end, using or not using emojis isn’t going to make or break your company. You’re social media can still flourish with or without the added element. If you are looking to spice up your organization’s social media presence and don’t know how to start, our team can get your on the right track! Shoot us an email at resteasy@devinepartners.com to get started!