As a man of a certain age, I’ll admit that I came to emojis fairly late in life.
Back in the early 2000s, if you wanted to send a smiley face on your Nokia 3310, it required some real thumb dexterity and a fair bit of patience. Touchscreen phones were years away so if someone sent you this ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ in a text, you knew they had time on their hands.
Fast forward a couple of decades and emojis are everywhere; in text messages, in boardroom emails and, most precipitously, social media. But are they right for LinkedIn, a platform that prides itself on being “professional”?
We often hear that ‘LinkedIn isn’t Facebook’, that it’s a professional space that demands formality.
And sure, there’s a higher proportion of accountants, fractional business developers and SEO experts posting compared with say, Instagram, but the platform has evolved.
LinkedIn today is a space for conversation, storytelling, and personal insight. For years now, people have been using emojis as an emotional shorthand to make their content more personable.
Used well, they can help your post stand out in a crowded feed and even convey tone where a block of text might fall flat.
But “used well” is the key phrase here.
Text should be clear enough to carry the message and any emojis should compliment it, not confuse the message with incongruous images. A colourful image draws the eyes, too many images, the reader is confused and has gone back to doom-scrolling.
If you’re lucky, people will scan the first two lines of your post. They scroll, pause, skim the first two lines, and move on if it looks like hard work.
At PR by Whitney, we handle the posts for clients across construction, law, health and beauty and many other sectors, and they all have one thing in common:
When it comes to engagement, formatting trumps even the most cutting insight.
That’s why bullet-points and emojis have been perhaps the most successful marriage of the 21st century. The brain loves a list – it subconsciously suggests ‘Hey, this will be easy to digest.’
In fact, it’s been so successful, there’s now a recognised A.I format associated with Emojis. You might have noticed it scrolling through feeds; hundreds of posts with sentence structure and image placement all, oddly familiar. Once people spot a format in your posts, they’ll assume it was A.I generated, which immediately destroys credibility people want to hear from people, not badly proofread A.I prompts.
For most of our clients, we definitely find a less is more approach to emojis straddles the line between personable and impactful.
Sounds like a simple one but, always a useful reminder: keep it simple. A survey in the U.K found that 35% of people felt anxiety about sending the wrong emoji and many more admitted confusion decoding some image heavy messages.
That confusion might not spark an international incident, but from a PR or brand perspective, clarity of intent is crucial. The text should be clear enough to carry the message by itself, with any emojis serving to compliment, not confuse the message with superfluous images.
Also, heed this advice as it does have the potential to spark international incidents, the use of the eggplant emoji 🍆 is basically a non-starter, unless you’re business is literally aubergine production.
You’ve probably seen marketing emails with emojis in the subject line, and if you did notice them, great – they did their job. Whether they look professional or not is subjective, but according to a Swiftpage study, emails with emojis in the subject line saw a 29% increase in open rates.
That’s not insignificant. But there’s a trade-off.
Emojis can make a subject line pop, or they can make it look like spam. For some audiences, it adds warmth; for others, it undermines credibility.
If you’re unsure, test it. Fortunately, we’re now at a place in time where engagement data can be harvested – we’ll occasionally compare engagement rates between campaigns that use emojis and those that don’t, this lets us utilise them most effectively for each individual client and their target market.
Which brings us to…
I had assumed that there’d be industries where emojis had yet to fully permeate; though to test that I checked the Linkedin pages of a few funeral homes and, whilst there were markedly fewer on average, there they were.
And that’s fine. Professional doesn’t have to mean joyless, but it does have to mean appropriate.
In more formal environments, such as legal, finance or governance, they should be used sparingly. Whilst the incongruity of a numerous smiley faces might initially draw the eye to a post by the Financial Conduct Authority, ultimately it would most likely serve to undermine the credibility of the institution.
It’s not just tone or perception at stake anymore. Just as emojis are now being seen in business correspondence and being recognised in courts as having legal consequence. In a 2023 Canadian case, a judge ruled that a simple thumbs-up emoji constituted agreement to a contract, making it legally binding.
So, given we’re now seeing legal weight behind these images, and we’re seeing them increasingly in business correspondence and emails, why shouldn’t businesses embrace them in their social strategy?
The takeaway? Emojis are here to stay but they are a tool, not a trend. Use them with purpose, not habit.
If you are interested in hearing more about the services we offer, please do get in touch with one of our team.
Manchester
22 St John Street,
Manchester
M3 4EB
London
16 Upper Woburn Place,
Euston
WC1H 0AF
Dubai
Property Investment Office,
F1 083 Property Investment
4 Building Dubai investment Park 1
