Buy My Emoji: An Analysis of Ads in Twitter/X

Abstract

Emojis, a visual representation of feelings, ideas, entities, statuses, or events, first appeared in 1995 and became available in 2011 for mobile devices. They are frequently found in messages on social networks and also in posts with marketing purposes. The present study aims to investigate the linguistic uses of emojis in brand posts in Brazilian X (former Twitter). We adopted the Cyberpragmatics approach (Yus, 2011) to data analysis in addition to previous studies on emoji use. Brands and/or industries from 3 different segments that have a Twitter profile in Brazilian Portuguese were included in the analysis. Data comprised 150 posts from 15 Brazilian brands. Emojis are primarily used to convey attitude and emotions, acting as pragmatic markers and occasionally as word replacements or reinforcement.