Influence of emojis on user engagement in brand-related user generated content

Emojis are increasingly adopted in various platforms, such as text messages, social media, or blogs, as part of other digital communications. Recently, emojis have been used in brand-related user-generated content (UGC) as a strategic communication tool to promote positive outcomes. In spite of their increasing importance, little is known about the impact of incorporating emojis in brand-related UGC on consumer reactions. In particular, few research studies have investigated the joint effect of emojis with texts, which is the most important context where emojis function, and the contextual conditions that affect the influence of emojis on consumer reactions. To fill this research gap, we study brand-related UGC, focusing on the effect of emojis and the contextual conditions (e.g., texts). Using large-scale brand-related social media posts from Instagram, we find that, overall, the presence of emojis is positively associated with consumer engagement. Economically, the presence of emojis increases the average number of likes by 72% and the average number of comments by 70% in comparison to posts without any emojis. The interaction effects between emojis and texts reveal that emotional emojis have a positive and significant relationship with consumer engagement only when the texts in brand-related UGC are being skewed toward positive sentiments. However, informational emojis are negatively related with consumer engagement in the similar context. Additionally, the investigations regarding the contextual conditions show that using more emotional emojis has a positive influence on consumer engagement in commercial posts but a negative influence in general posts.