Subscribe to the Social Media Lab Podcast via iTunes | Stitcher | Spotify
Emojis on Instagram: An In-Depth Study
By now we all know what emojis are.
We use them in text messages, posts on every social media site known to man.
They are a great, quick way to respond to someone.
And a tad lazy…
And if you have kids (or love cartoons) you’ve probably seen “The Emoji Movie” a dozen times like me!
But is there real value in using emojis in your Instagram posts?
Background about Emojis on Instagram
Quintly analyzed over 29,000 Instagram profiles and 5.5 million posts to discover some very interesting data:
- 57% of profiles used at least 1 emoji in their posts
- 24% of profiles with 1 to 1000 followers used emojis
- 51% of profiles with 1000 to 10,000 followers used emojis
- 68% of profiles with 10,000 to 100,000 followers used emojis
- 78% of profiles with 100,000 to 1 million followers used emojis
- 83% of profiles with over 1 million followers used emojis
- 31% of all image and 29% of all video posts contained emojis
- Posts with emojis had a 15% higher interaction rate
Another interesting discovery was the most used emojis. The camera emoji won — most likely because of its use as a photo attribution icon.
Being that this study was on such a wide array of profiles we wanted to test this on a smaller scale using our own accounts — while also looking at a few experts in social media to see how they stack up.
Hypothesis
Based on the study from Quintly our hypothesis will be: Using emojis on Instagram posts will result in higher engagement.
Testing Emojis on Instagram
We’ll take a look at data from 2 different sets of Instagram accounts:
- Accounts we own and have access to Insights
- Accounts we don’t own run by influencers
We’ll simply look at the number of Likes and Comments on the accounts we don’t own.
The Instagram accounts we own used in this test:
- @agorapulse – Our Instagram account for our company
- @scottayres – My personal Instagram account
- @spacewalkctx – Instagram account for a local bounce house company I owned (this account is no longer active).
The Instagram accounts we don’t own:
- @shortofheight – Aaron Lee
- @kimgarst – Kim Garst
- @freshlypicked – Freshly Picked is a fun company that sells baby moccasins, appeared on Shark Tank, and regularly uses Agorapulse to manage its social.
During a time span of one month, we’ll post updates to Instagram that both include and exclude emojis during a timespan of at least 1 month.
On the Instagram accounts we don’t own, we obviously won’t have any control of their posts. In these cases, we will draw data as far back as needed to have an even amount of posts with and without emojis to draw conclusions.
How We’ll Analyze Data Regarding Emojis on Instagram
- Create a spreadsheet for both account types and notate the posts with and without emojis.
- Average out the Impressions, Reach, Likes and Comments for each account (Only Likes and Comments for accounts we don’t own)
- Calculate an average for the data points for the accounts we own and don’t own.
- Calculate an average of Likes and Comments for all accounts used for the test
- Use Quintly’s “Interaction Rate Calculation” formula
These 5 different sets of data should bring us to a solid conclusion of the impact of emojis on Instagram posts.
The Quintly Interaction Rate Calculation formula is quite interesting, and one I hadn’t seen before:
Example
Likes: 150 | Comments: 40
Posts: 2 | Followers (start): 800 | Followers (end): 1,000
Interaction Rate = 10.5556%
Instead of just looking at raw data and averaging the numbers this formula takes into account the number of followers and posts to give a clearer picture of the results.
This formula will likely be the most important set of numbers we look at in our results and will be the data used to draw a conclusion.
In the posts for accounts we own, I’ll add 2-3 emojis at the beginning of the posts. For the non-owned accounts, I’ll consider it an emoji post if there are any emojis in the update — regardless of where they are placed or how many.
This study will not consider the amount of emojis or emojis used for results. (But doesn’t it sound good for a future Social Media Lab post? ?)
Emojis on Instagram Data
On each of the data points I share below, I’ll remove the highest and lowest performing post from the results. I do this to eliminate any anomaly a really viral post might have caused or a low performing post may cause.
*Also note that on the accounts I had no control of some of these posts could have been used for ads, I doubt it on Kim’s or Aaron’s account but on FreshlyPicked this is possible. I actually didn’t count a few of their posts as the engagement rates were nearly double or triple on a few and it was obvious these were giveaways that likely were part of an ad campaign.
Average Stats of All Accounts Studied
- With Emojis:
- 2188.21 Likes
- 19.67 Comments
- Without Emojis:
- 2154.25 Likes
- 12.62 Comments
Instagram posts with emojis win when we average out the Likes and Comments for all accounts!
But will this hold up to Quintly’s Interaction Rate formula?
Calculating Interaction Rate for Instagram Posts
The final data point we’ll use to draw a conclusion is Quntly’s formula.
Which you’ll recall is as follows:
(Likes + Comments)/#Posts X 100%/#Average Followers
When we average these 3 test accounts we own together, we get an Interaction Rate of 1.77% with emojis and 1.72% without.
Averaging the 3 external accounts gives us this result for the Interaction Rate:
Conclusion: Do Emojis on Instagram Post Lead to More Engagement?
Earlier in this post, I said the final conclusion would be made using Quintly’s Interaction Rate for Instagram.
If we concluded that emojis didn’t perform better based purely on the Impressions and Reach of the posts I owned, my conclusion would have been that posts with emojis didn’t perform as well as posts without.
That’s why it’s so important to ensure you’re looking at the full data when drawing these types of conclusions.
Had I done this I would have been wrong, as I wasn’t taking into consideration the number of posts or the follower count on the earliest and latest post I pulled data from.
By using Quintly’s formula I’m given different results — that are much more scientific.
After averaging all 6 pages together that I studied, the Interaction Rates looked like this:
- With Emojis: 1.75%
- Without Emojis: 1.70%
Based on this I can conclude that Instagram posts with emojis result in a higher level of engagement.
Although I did not see a 15% increase like Quintly did in their study, I did see an increase of 2.94% in the Interaction Rates with vs without emojis.
This leads me to conclude that using emojis in Instagram does in fact lead to more engagement — just as I originally hypothesized.
But are these results statistically significant?
The quick answer is no.
I plugged the numbers into multiple statistic calculators and the difference between 1.75% and 1.70%, both using 110 posts, just isn’t statistically significant.
That being said a 2.94% increase in the Interaction Rate isn’t bad and would lead me to continue posting emojis in my updates.
This data suggests a psychological trend. When users are scrolling through the feed at 90mph emojis seem to have some sort of stopping power which makes people pay more attention.
And finally, if emojis can give a business a 2.94-15% increase in interactions then I’d say there’s a definite business value there.
