I fell down a rabbit hole when I pondered what the most common emojis are.
Let’s back up. I’ve started to use the . + Windows Key combo to find emojis more often than I used to. You know, for Teams Chats and cute lil’ emails. For me, this says a lot. I’m from the long-ago-time when < 3 represented a heart. And it was cooler to type less-than-three than to insert a ❤. So my uptick in emoji use MUST mean that other people are adapting, too!
I wondered: what’s the most common emoji (just how many hearts did you send out yesterday)? And how do you trust any website to inform you of the most used emojis? How do they really know? I mean, how do they collect data, and from where do they collect it? I found a number of sites that purported to relay the Top 10 Emojis in a David Letterman fashion, but I didn’t trust the URLs. Somewhat randomly, I threw my stock into this site: https://emojipedia.org/stats/ (because it’s a .ORG, and not some ridiculous-sounding domain name). I found this Unicode.Org site informative, if not evasive, too.
These sites did have some information in common, though. Firstly, the ❤ is a chart-topper on any website and is considered an OG of the Unicode emoji world. Next, the Tears of Joy emoji is deeply uncool (why?!) but more popular than the heart. From there, everything devolves.
What I also learned in this silly goose chase is that emoji data collection is siloed. Most often, the popularity of an emoji has to be collected from a specific site or use case. And the most common site for data collection? Twitter. There’s even a real-time count of emojis as they are tweeted: ticker.
The heart, you’ll find, is in the top two.