Rise of emojis, Facebook video confirm power of visuals in marketing
Posted by Matt Hayden on Sunday, June 19, 2016
I posted earlier about the intriguing rise in emoji marketing that's been happening lately. This clearly isn't just a passing fad, as I'm sure some would have suspected. It's actually starting to become a marketing genre in its own right.
Confirmation of this is the fact that Twitter will soon enable advertisers to target people according to their emoji use when creating campaigns.
This says a lot about the power of visuals in marketing. And the reason visuals are powerful is because they convey emotion so well. (The word "emoji" bears this out too.)
Emojis aren't really my cup of tea, I have to say. But some tweeps are very adept at using them. From what I can tell, these tend to be women more than men. At the risk of being politically incorrect, I suspect this is because women are more emotionally driven than men. Another fact that seems to confim this is that Pinterest, which is completely visually oriented, is female dominated.
I'm pretty sure this is not the case with video. Maybe that's because videos, while obviously highly visual, are more about telling stories. Still images are more impressionistic. Emojis embellish a tweet, give it emotional highlights. But the words still tell the story, convey the facts.
Speaking of video: It continues to gain popularity. Of course people usually think of YouTube as its major destination on the web. But Facebook has done its utmost to challenge that dominance in recent years. Not sure if its taken the crown yet. In any case, Facebook users clearly love video, and share them like crazy.
Not only that, Facebook is forecasting that video will completely dominate it in years to come. Well, I don't know about that. I think there will always be room for words.
But I can understand why they think that might happen. The beauty of video as a medium is that it's actually easier than writing. You just need to keep your camera with you and capture interesting stuff. Given that short videos seem to be most popular, you don't even need to edit them. That's liberating for a lot of people.
Confirmation of this is the fact that Twitter will soon enable advertisers to target people according to their emoji use when creating campaigns.
This says a lot about the power of visuals in marketing. And the reason visuals are powerful is because they convey emotion so well. (The word "emoji" bears this out too.)
Emojis aren't really my cup of tea, I have to say. But some tweeps are very adept at using them. From what I can tell, these tend to be women more than men. At the risk of being politically incorrect, I suspect this is because women are more emotionally driven than men. Another fact that seems to confim this is that Pinterest, which is completely visually oriented, is female dominated.
Speaking of video: It continues to gain popularity. Of course people usually think of YouTube as its major destination on the web. But Facebook has done its utmost to challenge that dominance in recent years. Not sure if its taken the crown yet. In any case, Facebook users clearly love video, and share them like crazy.
Not only that, Facebook is forecasting that video will completely dominate it in years to come. Well, I don't know about that. I think there will always be room for words.
But I can understand why they think that might happen. The beauty of video as a medium is that it's actually easier than writing. You just need to keep your camera with you and capture interesting stuff. Given that short videos seem to be most popular, you don't even need to edit them. That's liberating for a lot of people.
