• Let your customers use emojis to give you quick feedback. The preferred choice of customers to let a brand know they’re doing a good job is the thumbs up, ???? followed by a star ✨ or a smiley face. ????
• Avoid anything cryptic or ambiguous. If the emoji doesn’t clearly communicate your intended message, don’t use it. ???? (Pizza, anyone? You see what I mean.)
• Emojis are for complimenting your message, not replacing it.
• Since women ???? tend to use emojis more than men ????, consider your target market when deciding how often to use emojis.
• Don’t think that only young people use emojis because they are popular at all ages, although the meaning of certain emojis can be slightly different for a 20-year old and a 60-year old.
• Use emotional emojis to break down barriers and humanize your brand.
• Consider creating your own emojis for your brand. For example, they might look like other emojis except they are wearing something like a hat or bowtie that identifies them with your business.
• If you are communicating with an individual in business and you are unsure, use social mimicry for clues. If they are using an informal tone or if they use an emoji themselves, then it’s fine to send your own emojis.
• Use only common emojis that are easy to understand or already universal. The idea is to improve your communications, not bewilder your audience.

Know that a small segment of your audience will be totally clueless about emojis and another small segment will take emoji use to an artform.

For example, Cosmo published a 2200 word article on the importance of choosing the just right color and style of heart emojis for the right occasions.

It’s all the people in between those two extremes that you are targeting with your emojis, so don’t sweat it if you don’t always get your emoji usage exactly right – almost no one does.