Emoji is the fastest growing language in the world, but the way we use emojis is deeply personal.

The Brandwatch React team, with our new tool Audiences, decided to explore the ways in which we use emojis by breaking down usage by gender.

We chose a collection of our favorite emojis and searched for them in Twitter bios and tweets to check out the gender data surrounding them.

Methodology

Brandwatch Audiences can scan active tweeters’ bios as well as search a representative 10% sample of all tweets, giving us a good idea of which the most popular emojis are and who uses them.

To determine gender, we ran author names through a vast database and then categorized accounts as owned by men or women (where it is unsure or the account in question is organizational, it does not assign a gender).

Emojinal

We started by examining how we express our feelings online. It turns out men are less inclined to weep digital tears than women, and they really aren’t fans of the crying cat emoji.

We used a couple of emojis here that could be interpreted as including tears but aren’t always primarily used for that purpose (see the top right and bottom left).

Of those emojis, the “laughing crying face” was the most popular. In fact, it appears to be the most popular emoji out there.

Sci-fi/horror emoji data

Crying on Twitter is all well and good, but what about when we want to report a ghost sighting? Or that we have been possessed by an evil spirit?

It turns out once again that women are more inclined to use this set of emojis. The only one men significantly out-tweeted them on in this batch, was the robot face emoji (and it’s not exactly a massively popular one).

Of this set, we found the ghost emoji to be most popular, with smiley purple devil face and scary skull face just behind.