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Emoji power: How a 🤯 or a 👏🏽 fuel social media engagement, especially amid COVID-19

By Ethan Pancer and Lindsay McShane

The restrictions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic drove life online in 2020, where it will probably remain for much of 2021.

The way we communicate quickly pivoted to Zoom meetings, remote learning and messaging on social media. And in the absence of face-to-face interactions, people quickly became more reliant on emojis to help express their thoughts and feelings to an audience they can no longer see in person.

A man in a mask walks past a mural with a giant emoji.
A man wearing a protective face mask and gloves walks past a large emoji face painted on the boarded-up windows of a store on Robson Street, in Vancouver, in May 2020. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

The digital shift has made the emoji an integral part of written language. Ninety-two per cent of consumers online use some form of emoji in their communications. On Instagram, nearly half of the posts contain emojis. In 2015, the Oxford Dictionary went so far as to declare