Use of Emojis

We often use emojis to build and maintain relationships online. Write an article for your school newsletter stating three advantages of using emojis.

The use of facial icons in communication has a long tradition, holding particularly popular among youngsters. Over the past few years they have changed a lot and become more standardized, termed as ‘emojis’. Its increasing use not only has taken place in private affairs, but also begin in the business field. In 2015, the Oxford Dictionaries chose an emoji as its word of the year, making them a fascinating focus around the world. Although emojis cannot be a replacement for language, they are an efficient and interesting complementary form of communication.

Humans prefer visuals and things that are easy to understand. Sometimes a picture denotes how you are feeling better than words can. Emojis serve these purposes well, and allow people to ignore chunks of text. Even better, emojis convey emotion that is difficult to sum up in words. Considering you are extremely happy with something, an emoji showing exhilaration can tell others all of your feelings. When you are awfully distraught and the word ‘sad’ simply isn’t strong enough, you can use the emoji with two rivers of tears streaming from the eyes instead. What’s more, emojis are universal: we don’t necessarily have to speak the same language to know how someone is feeling when we see them.

Emojis are more engaging. Messages with emoji in them look friendlier somehow, having positive effects on our mood. In turn, they trigger our quick responses. When someone sends us a comment that contains a happy emoji, it makes us smile. It is like seeing the sender’s face smiling at me, rather than just a boring screen with text. Research shows that Instagram posts which feature emojis get significantly more interactions. A survey even revealed that the open rate of marketing letters with emojis in the subject line was way higher compared to the plain subject lines.

Emojis help save space and time. They are, at their heart, a language of visual short cuts. And when a social networking site, like twitter, limits that space or the pressure of life and time makes people declined to text, using emojis gets our message across faster than anything else. In case we rush into doing something, emojis come into very handy by providing genuine convenience for users.

Despite the above-mentioned advantages of emojis, not everyone likes them. According to the statistics, one third of people don’t like to see such characters in any online communication, especially in business correspondence, and even see them as unacceptable. Therefore, a sudden introduction of emojis may provoke negative results. We have to use them wisely and prudently.