An emoji-based metric for monitoring consumers’ emotions toward brands on social media

The purpose of this paper is to introduce and test a new emoji-based metric that could be used to monitor consumers’ emotions toward brands on social media.

To test this new metric, 720 consumer tweets were retrieved from official Twitter accounts of 18 leading global brands representing 6 product categories/markets. In order to check its validity, the emoji-based metric was correlated with two measures: the percentage of positive emojis from Brandwatch’s (2018) Emoji Report and the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) for 2017.

The findings of this paper indicate that consumers tend to use more (vs less) positive emojis when expressing their feelings toward Coca-Cola (vs Taco Bell). They also show that the new metric is highly and positively associated with the ACSI, hence supporting its validity.

The new metric is only applicable to brands that have a social media presence.

The proposed metric is easy to implement and interpret by almost every researcher and manager.

While all extant brand sentiment analyses focus on analyzing the words in brand-related user-generated content, this paper considers an alternative source of information about emotions, that is, emojis. Beyond being valid, the proposed emoji-based metric is unique, easy to implement and interpret, and generalizable.