A social media influencer is anybody who has established credibility on social media. These kinds of people have large audiences, so targeting them will almost always help you grow your own online audience. On the surface, that sounds like a simple plan. All you need to do is target those people who have large followings on Twitter and Facebook, and you should be just fine, right? Well, it’s not that easy. Different things appeal to different audiences, so not all of your biggest influencers will be appropriate to every campaign you run. If you want your influencer marketing campaign to be successful, you need to choose the right influencers. Here are some tips that will help you with that.

Look at Age and Gender

Since like attracts like, social media influencers often develop followings of people much like themselves. Middle-aged women who run mommy blogs will attract other middle-aged women, and young male gamers will attract other young male gamers. Find out what kind of audience your services will likely attract, and find an influencer that falls into that demographic. The key here is to think about your audience and potential clients. You might be tempted to just focus on one influential person, but that’s just one person. They are one of many people you want to attract to your campaign. Focus on the big picture.

Look at Total Reach

Reach refers to the number of people who saw a piece of content, whether they found it on their Facebook feed organically or it showed up as part of an ad. While an influencer’s total reach shouldn’t be the only reason why you would target them, it is something that shouldn’t be ignored. Take a look at the number of people who have seen something that an influencer has posted if you want to get an idea of how influential they are.

Choose the Right Platforms

There are several social media platforms out there that go beyond Facebook and Twitter. Depending on what your product is and who you want to reach, you might be better off looking for influencers on Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, or one of the many other social media sites on the Internet. You will probably want to stick to established networks that already have plenty of users, but you don’t need to limit yourself to them. Take a look at the audience you want to reach, and see what kinds of networks they are using. Chances are that there is a huge influencer on these networks that will help you grow your audience into something bigger than you could imagine.

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The emoji may have had a humble beginning as a crudely drawn smiley face, but it has since evolved into a surprisingly complex way for people to express their emotions. Whether your text messages are made up of these tiny little icons or you see them as the death of literacy, you cannot deny that there are some very interesting facts about emojis that you need to know if you spend time on the Internet. Here are just five of the more interesting tidbits about emojis.

1. The Origin of Emojis Dates Back to 1862

Emojis evolved from the classic smiley face emoticon, ;), which was reportedly first used in 1862. It later evolved into the yellow smiley face in the 1960s. The first permutations of that smiling yellow circle first showed up on the Internet in the 1990s when people needed to find ways to communicate emotions in as few characters as possible.

2. Not All Emojis Mean What You Think

For the most part, emojis are pretty straightforward. A smiley face means that you’re happy, a frowning face means that you’re sad, etc. And yet, there are some emojis that people often find confusing. For example, an emoji with steam coming out of its nose is supposed to represent triumph, but many interpret it as a sign of anger or frustration. Many of these misinterpretations stem from the fact that the first true emojis were developed for the Japanese market and culture, not for American users.

3. The Process of Becoming an Emoji is Surprisingly Complicated

All emojis need to be designed and approved by the Unicode Consortium, a nonprofit that enables people around the world to use computers and programs in any language. This is to ensure that all emojis can be rendered accurately across multiple computer platforms.

4. The “Face with Tears of Joy” is the Most-Used Emoji

According to Emoji Tracker, the “face with tears of joy” emoji is the most popular and widely-used emoji on Twitter. It is used to express laughter, especially when something is really funny (hence the tears of joy). The red heart, the heart-eyes face, and the pink hearts emojis come in second, third, and fourth place respectively.

5. There is an Entire Book Written in Emoji

“Emoji Dick” is a version of “Moby Dick” written entirely in emojis. It is crowd sourced, crowd funded, and available in print for $40. If you’re curious as to how a great work of literature reads when it is translated into emojis, you can order your own copy here.

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You’ve seen the minimal, graphical representations known as emojis everywhere – even if you don’t send emails or text frequently. Popular as addendums to notes; or sometimes used as messages all by themselves, emojis are now forging a new niche in advertising, where their capacity for communication has already been employed by industry giants such as Domino’s Pizza and the World Wildlife Federation.

First of All: What Is an Emoji?

An emoji isn’t merely a picture – it’s a character of text in the form of an image. Your browser actually treats it like a language, and the images are uniform in this way. For example, Domino’s might tweet pizza emojis to followers; if you wanted to send a pizza emoji to a friend, you could use the same one as Domino’s. There are, of course, multiple different kinds of pizza emojis; the point is that the same ones available to the pizza giant are also available to you. The word emoji, itself, comes from the Japanese and means “picture, writing, character.”

The verdict is in: people love emojis. They’re a succinct and visually-appealing way to convey a quick message, as well as to immediately identify the company in the breakneck pace of mobile advertising. If your local zoo, for example, tweets out a message with 5 lions as emojis, this could quickly suggest that they just got an import of five new lions – and now would be a great time for that zoo visit you’ve been putting off.

Making Sure Emojis Work for Your Brand

While it’s true that brands can make and use their own emojis, these won’t be considered a part of the official emoji language supported universally by mobile applications and browser. And since the whole point of a company sending out such messages is for public consumption, sending one out that browsers can’t recognize defeats the purpose of advertising.

As is clear, the best way to utilize emojis is on social media platforms. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words, right? The right combination of the two energizes your message, and gives it priority over all the other businesses out there that send out the same entirely word-based tweets and Facebook Wall message week after week.

Businesses That Have Seen Success with Emoji Advertising

There’s a general rule of business: if you want to know what’s successful, watch what the giants are doing. After all, they’ve got expensive and robust analytics at their disposal, and rarely do anything without tons of market research strongly suggesting success. Dove – the soap-maker – uses emojis liberally; in fact, the company made its own, and then made these available for download so that others could use them. Here are a few others:

• Burger King made chicken fries emojis as part of a campaign to announce the return of this food item upon customer request.
• NBA 2016 champions the Cleveland Cavaliers made a string of emojis featuring their current roster of players
• Celebrities such as Kim Kardashian and rapper Wiz Khalifa have made emojis bearing their likeness
• Auto giant Ford Motor Company has also gotten into the emoji spirit

By all accounts, then, it seems as though emoji advertising is beneficial. They make it easier to convey a message in the limited space available for getting your message across on a Smartphone or tablet, and some say that they could form a big part of the future of mobile advertising.

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