TL;DR – w skrócieEmoji are the language of the internet, and they’ve spread to every continent. They’re a phenomenon with legions of fans around the world, their own holiday (World Emoji Day, celebrated on July 17) and even their own movie. Here are 17 facts that will help you understand why emoji, and the emoticons that started it all, are so popular, and have been ever since 1982.
We first put this list together in 2019, based on the data and reports available at the time. In 2026, we updated the figures where newer data exists (including the number of emoji in the Unicode Standard and the ranking of the most frequently used emoji), and we note the date of each older study. You’ll find the full list of sources at the end of the article.
Emoji were created for Japanese mobile phones in the late 1990s. They went global after they were added to iPhones running iOS in 2011, and then to Android devices.
Emoji look different depending on the app and operating system you use (iOS, Windows, Android and others). The set is steadily expanded and updated by the Unicode Consortium (unicode.org). In March 2019, the Unicode Standard included 3,019 emoji, and Emoji 18.0, released in September 2026, brought the total to 3,972. Both figures also include gender and skin tone sequences, flags and the components used to build sequences.
The history of emoticons, the forerunners of emoji, is much longer than most people think and goes back to the 1980s. The revolutionary combination of a colon, a hyphen and a parenthesis that changed online communication was first sent in 1982 by Scott Fahlman, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University. He spent a long time working out how to arrange the parentheses, hyphens and colons, and added detailed instructions for use. To make communication easier at his workplace, he reportedly sent the following email:
“I propose that jokes be marked with the following character sequence: :-) Read it sideways. On the other hand, it would be more economical to mark things that are not jokes. For that, use: :-(”
Some researchers, however, doubt that Fahlman should be called the “father of emoticons.” American journalists trace the first use back to a transcript of an 1862 speech by Abraham Lincoln. Could the famous president have been the first to use an emoticon?
According to the Unicode Consortium, 92% of the world’s internet users use emoji (the figure the consortium gave in 2021). The character set itself keeps growing, too: over the past dozen or so years, the number and variety of emoji have increased dramatically.
New emoji arrive every year. In 2018 (Emoji 11.0), 157 new characters were added. The set keeps evolving and represents more and more groups, such as people with disabilities, different ethnic groups and the LGBTQ+ community. In 2019 (Emoji 12.0), the emoji library grew by 230 new entries that make it more inclusive. And that’s not all: the additions also include practical emoji, such as garlic 🧄. The set is still growing: Emoji 17.0 (2025) added 163 emoji, and Emoji 18.0 (2026) added 19 (counting skin tone variants).
Emoji are an easy way to liven up brand posts, which is why they often show up in tips on how to boost audience engagement. But the numbers floating around online (such as how many more likes Facebook posts with emoji get, or how much more engagement tweets with emoji get on Twitter, now X) are more than a decade old, and they often lack a description of the method or come from one-off tests. Both platforms’ algorithms have changed many times since then.
So instead of relying on other people’s statistics, test emoji in your own brand communication on social media and see how your audience responds to them, whatever your industry.
Staying with social media: according to data from Instagram’s engineering team, in March 2015 nearly half of all text posted on the platform contained emoji. That lets Instagrammers around the world show admiration for each other’s work without words.
Fun fact: emoji often mean different things depending on where you are and which community you belong to. For example, an Emojipedia analysis from December 2016 found that only 7% of English-language tweets with the peach emoji 🍑 were about the fruit. In the rest, 🍑 most often meant “butt” or showed up in other non-fruit contexts 😊. Which ones? We’ll leave that to your own research.
In the Unicode Consortium’s 2021 ranking, the most frequently used emoji in the world was 😂, Face with Tears of Joy. It accounted for more than 5% of all emoji use, and it also topped the previous edition of the ranking, from 2019. The classic Emojitracker, which counted emoji in tweets in real time, logged more than 3.8 billion uses of 😂 before it was shut down (after changes to Twitter’s API)!
The top 10 of that ranking is dominated by positive emoji. Only one, Loudly Crying Face 😭, is associated with negative emotions. Here’s the full top 10:
In this section, and in facts 15 and 16, we draw on Brandwatch’s classic study, The Emoji Report (today it’s available in French). Brandwatch analyzed a 10% sample of all tweets published between September 2015 and September 2017 and, based on that, estimated that more than 6.4 billion emoji appeared on Twitter during that period. The data is years old and comes from a single platform, but it clearly shows how differently we use emoji.
Women and men use emoji in completely different ways. Women use them far more often: according to Brandwatch data cited by B&T, they made up 61% of people using emoji on Twitter. Men are more likely to use characters such as 👀, 😎, 🤔, 😅 and 😏, while women favor 🙄, ❤️, 😴, 🙃 and 💜.
The report also found that women are 11% more likely to use emoji that express joy, while men are 35% more likely to use emoji that express fear. Does that mean women use emoji when they’re happy, and when they’re not, all that’s left is the passive-aggressive period? 🙂
Brandwatch’s time-of-day data covers only tweets from the UK. It shows that most emoji appear in the evening, with the peak starting around 9 p.m. The share of negative emoji also rises in the evening: from 22.5% during the day (6 a.m.–8 p.m.) to 27.3% at night (8 p.m.–6 a.m.). Measuring activity throughout the day makes it possible to analyze spikes in interest around trends.
You don’t have to be a social media genius to know that everyone looks forward to the weekend. The emoji data backs it up! The average share of positive emoji on Fridays and Saturdays was 77.7% 📆, compared with 76.2% on the other days of the week.
With analytics tools, we can track sentiment around events over time, and with it, how internet users perceive them. Brandwatch found that over the two years covered by the study, the share of negative emoji rose from 23.2% to 25.4% 😡, which may suggest an increase in events that the public perceives negatively.
The most negative emoji were recorded in the month of the US presidential election (November 8, 2016). In the week of the election, which Donald Trump won, their share rose to as much as 28.9% 😢. It also rose by 3% in the UK in the months before and during the EU membership referendum (June 23, 2016), as an expression of British discontent ☹️.
We’ve already talked about audience engagement on social media. But that’s not all! Leanplum and App Annie looked at the impact of emoji in push notifications sent by mobile apps. The study, published in 2017, analyzed more than 2.6 billion of these notifications.
Push notifications with emoji had an 85% higher open rate than those without, according to a Leanplum report. Emoji can also make a message clearer, and the study’s authors say they help retain users, too. If you build mobile apps, though, check this with an A/B test on your own users, since the data is years old.
…at least judging by how they use emoji. Brandwatch looked at European countries from this angle: the most emoji-positive turned out to be Montenegro, Monaco and Gibraltar, and the most emoji-negative were the Netherlands, the UK and Greece.
The differences don’t stop at sentiment. According to a 2015 SwiftKey report covered by Hyperallergic, hearts ❤️ made up 55% of emoji typed in French: four times the international average and three times more than in the next most “heart-heavy” language. The report was based on a billion emoji typed by SwiftKey keyboard users. For more breakdowns by country, region and city, see Brandwatch’s The Emoji Report.
An emoji sentiment analysis of posts about brands (Brandwatch, tweets from 2015–2017) showed that the brands with the most positive reception were:
Top brands know that engagement is the most important metric of a good campaign. That’s why emoji marketing keeps gaining ground and increasingly makes its way into communication strategies. To wrap up the list, here are three emoji marketing classics from 2015 that turned the emoji phenomenon into a creative idea.
A) Durex and #CondomEmoji. Internet users have known for years that emoji say more than words. There are plenty of ways to hint at sexual contexts with emoticons, but in 2015 there was no emoji for safe sex. Durex seized on that gap with its #CondomEmoji campaign, asking people to use and share the hashtag to support its bid for the first official safe sex emoji. According to the brand’s survey, 80% of people aged 16–25 find it easier to express themselves with emoji, and 84% feel more comfortable talking about sex using them. Based on that, Durex decided to promote safe sex (and its products) through emoji, which builds awareness and a positive brand image.
B) McDonald’s and Taco Bell. Big brands on social media use emoji too. McDonald’s and Taco Bell, among others, have used them in their campaigns.
C) WWF and #EndangeredEmoji. To raise awareness of endangered animals, WWF created a series of 17 emoji depicting endangered species and encouraged users to donate 10 pence every time they shared one. The #EndangeredEmoji campaign was hugely popular on Twitter.
Emoji are a small part of communication that can genuinely boost engagement, as long as they fit the brand and its audience. If you want your brand to speak your customers’ language, see how we run ad campaigns or write to us.
If you want to learn more, check out the sources for this list. Items 1–7 are sources from 2019. We added the rest in 2026 when we updated the data. We removed sources that no longer work, along with any figures we couldn’t confirm elsewhere.
