Check out this analysis of Emojicon usage on Twitter.

Emojicons on Twitter Analysis

You know these emojicons that people have been unlocking in their iPhones lately? They're great, but Apple flipped out recently and is removing all the apps that unlock them from the store.

Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to see how people are posting them to Twitter. Even though you can only view them with an iPhone folks still use them a fair amount when posting from their phone. For specifics on the unicode business see here.

To get these numbers I iterated through all 469 icons and searched Twitter via their API going back as far as I could, which turned out to be Jan 20th. I ran the analysis on Feb 28th. The most search results I could get for anything was 1500, which is documented as the max in their docs. So a 1500 count means that emojicon redlined, and there are more but I couldn't get at them. I also used this Greasemonkey script a bunch.

Ok, let's see some numbers and charts and stuff.

Overall Usage

First of all, check out how emojicon usage on Twitter has risen over the past month. I imagine that first spike could be tracked to some blog post on Gizmodo or something about the apps that unlocked the icons.

Most Popular

Here are the top 25 most popular emojicons. They're mostly used to actually express emotion it turns out.

I think the most important take away from this exercise is that the shit with eyes beat out the heart by exactly 10 instances. That's powerful.

1500
1500
1500
1500
1460
1457
1211
1118
969
797
747
731
670
666
635
589
578
560
550
531
508
449
447
424
407

Valentine's Day

Heart icons spiked on Valentine's Day:

Here's the full heart breakdown:

550
163
163
123
104
57
45
44
40
19

People

Check out these faces. Folks seem to like this head-wrapped fellow.

40
31
26
23
21
17
15
14
13
12

Flags

Here's the iPhone UN. I would have expected the Japanese flag to be used more, given that these icons originated over there.

46
26
26
10
9
8
5
4
2
1

Fun

These emojicons are indicative of a fine evening about town.

257
205
194
94
81
80
76
15
8

And check out how they're sort of mostly used on weekends:

Monday110
Tuesday108
Wednesday151
Thursday111
Friday215
Saturday177
Sunday138

Posting Sources

Here's the breakdown for the most popular clients people are using to post emojicon tweets to Twitter. It's mostly iPhone apps, of course.

Tweetie11108
Twinkle9329
TwitterFon8416
twitterrific3459
Twittelator2123
Twittelator2079
mobile web540
txt531
EventBox484
TwitPic372

Old Fashioned Emoticons

Here's the breakdown for just the faces. I like how the least popular face is that constipated looking guy. What's his deal?

1500
1500
1500
1500
1460
1211
1118
969
797
747
670
666
635
589
578
531
508
449
447
407
393
385
377
315
300
280
280
273
268
217
159
101

Worthless

Lastly, these weren't used at all: