Smile: happy faces are top emoji choice

http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2015/apr/22/smile-happy-faces-are-top-emoji-choice

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From smiley faces to clapping hands, emojis have become, for some at least, as much a part of expression as text in a message.

Analysis of more than 1bn pieces of emoji data across 16 different languages by SwiftKey, the keyboard app, shows the top emojis among its users.

The face with tears of joy is the most popular overall, representing 15% of all emoji usage. It also ranks top in all but five of the language options; French, US Spanish, Turkish, Spanish and Latin American.

The number one choice overall is followed by the following emojis: face throwing a kiss, heavy black heart, smiling face with heart shaped eyes and loudly crying, which complete the top five.

Hearts seem to be the most popular for French users with the heavy black heart emoji and sparkling heart the top two choices, followed by the face with tears of joy. For users of the US Spanish, Spanish and Latin American language setting, the face throwing a kiss emoji was the go-to. For Turkish users the smiling face with open mouth and smiling eyes was a firm favourite instead.

Swiftkey have also ranked the emoji’s more broadly by category. Overall, six of the most popular emoji choices fall within Swiftkey’s ‘happy smileys category’.

Grouped into categories, the results show that happy faces are the most used emoji category, followed by sad faces and hearts. Unsurprisingly, more niche choices such as ocean creatures, outer space and tools are among the least used categories.

Analysis of the categories by language throws up some rather cliché conclusions: ‘party’ emojis are top for Spanish users while the ‘hearts’ and ‘wedding’ categories are the category leaders for the French while ‘mammals’, ‘alcohol’ and ‘junk food’ categories are among the top for Australian English users. For Russian users ‘cold weather’ emojis such as snowflake are among the most used.

The findings in its report come from an analysis of aggregate SwiftKey Cloud data (an opt in service which backs up and syncs language insights across devices) over a four-month period between October 2014 and January 2015. It includes both Android and iOS devices.

SwiftKey also notes that the frequency of any individual emoji is small as there are more than 800 emojis for users to select. But despite the restrictions the report gives some interesting insight. As the Atlantic points out emoji use is difficult to track and while Emojitracker gives realtime data on emoji use on Twitter, it does not include emoji use, for example, in text messages, email or notes.