Befriend An Emoji
Facebook users have for a long time had little opportunity to show their emotions when it comes to viewing other posts. Over the past week this changed, Facebook launched a new range of emotional emojis.
No longer are users restricted to just a ‘Like’ or making comments, now they can show their emotions in a quick and easy way. Although Facebook didn’t add a ‘Dislike’ button, they have instead added the options of ‘Love’, ‘Haha’, ‘Wow’, ‘Sad’ & ‘Angry’ to the “Like’ emoji. All this is great for the experience of regular Facebook users, but there are several far more important benefits that you probably haven’t even considered.
In the last few months, LAW Creative has carried out several innovative Google ad campaigns where Google scrapes the content of a users inbox, allowing us the opportunity to target Gmail ads to the users. These ads are directly related to the words within the emails they’ve received. These may be the names of competitors or an important search phrase for a product or service. In a similar way, the emojis will paint a clear picture of Facebook users preferences and feelings towards products, brands, events and more. This information could at some time in the future, if authorised by Facebook, be used by advertisers to target Facebook ads to ‘exact’ users based on their emotional feelings. For example you currently serve ads on Facebook targeting users who have ‘Liked’ one of your competitors pages. You could achieve a far better conversion rate if you targeted users who have used the ‘Sad and ‘Angry’ emojis on those same pages.
There is one other major benefit – tackling crime and insurgents. For a while now Law enforcement agencies have used media scraping software to identify online chatter. With some insurgent groups relying heavily on social media to spread it’s message and recruit new followers, monitoring Facebook’s emojis can identify online conflicts, and a show of sympathy from individuals for a cause. All this information can be easily identified by crime analysts and offer new methods to prevent crimes before they occur.
Although Facebook’s emojis offer more freedom of expression for its’ users. The implications for advertisers and law enforcement offer a major game change. LAW Creative is a forward thinking agency, always looking for new opportunities and ways to make our client’s campaigns stand out from the rest of the competition. If you would like to discuss ideas for your company’s online presence, please get in touch with paul.keene@lawcreative.co.uk.