If you follow a lot of brands on social media, you’ve noticed that more and more of them are using emoji in their messaging and branding. According to a study by WordStream, using an emoji in a Tweet can increase engagement by 25% compared to messages without emoji. Using an emoji in your Facebook posts can increase shares by 33% and interactions with your post by 57%.

Beyond these statistics, emoji can also help to make your brand more relatable, add context to your messaging, and appeal to the emotions of your audience on a deeper level.

Humanize your brand

When your audience trusts your brand, they’re more likely to recommend you to others and become long-term supporters. Using emoji in your messaging can add an extra level of personality and relatability to your brand. You can humanize your brand and relate to your audience by speaking their language with the emoji they use daily in text messaging, chat and personal social posts.

On more professional platforms like LinkedIn, using emoji can help your brand stand out in a sea of text posts. Rather than using them to communicate, you can create more eye-catching lists, or emphasize your posts and headlines with symbols. Before sticking a bunch of emoji in your messaging, get to know your key demographic and who it is you’re targeting. While emoji can be a great way to humanize your brand, overdoing it or using emoji that don’t appeal to your audience can also alienate them when you don’t do the proper research.

Better engage your audience

Why do people use emoji to communicate with their friends and family? They’re fun and engaging! Emoji can create a massive for your brand when used correctly.

It’s clear that something about an emoji makes people want to engage–they stand out among text posts and have a friendly, casual appearance. Plus, many social platforms now support searching by emoji so they’re more universal than images and video and let both users and marketers tap into themed conversations, similar to hashtags. Push notifications that incorporate emoji can get up to 85% more opens and 9% more conversions than text-only notifications. No matter what channel you’re using, adding the right emoji can boost engagement and lead to a higher conversion rate.

Add context to your content

Using emoji in your marketing copy can also add extra context to your messaging. In the same way that an exclamation point can change the tone communicated by your message, adding an emoji can convey emotions that you can’t do with text alone. Social media emojis won’t replace good copy, but the two can work together to add more depth and meaning to your words.

On platforms like Twitter, where you have a limited character count, using emoji can add extra context and emotion to your message when you can’t use extra words. Again, consider audiences using screen readers when composing Tweets like this–after testing in a screen reader or by reading the emoji names aloud, you may want to add additional context using text for clarity.

Before adding emoji to your marketing strategy, ask yourself if it aligns with the tone of your brand. Also, make sure that you do the research to find out the meanings of different emoji before you use them. The last thing you want is to advertise healthy produce only to find out the emoji you chose has an entirely different meaning on the internet.

It’s important to understand who your audience is, to know how they’ll respond to emoji marketing. Just because you see other brands using emoji doesn’t mean that the same strategy will work for you. Learn about where your audience is most active, and how they engage with your existing posts.