An emoji-based metric for monitoring consumers’ emotions toward brands on social media

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to introduce and test a new emoji-based metric that could be used to monitor consumers’ emotions toward brands on social media. Design/methodology/approach: To test this new metric, 720 consumer tweets were retrieved from official Twitter accounts of 18 leading global brands representing 6 product categories/markets. In order to check its validity, the emoji-based metric was correlated with two measures: the percentage of positive emojis from Brandwatch’s (2018) Emoji Report and the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) for 2017. Findings: The findings of this paper indicate that consumers tend to use more (vs less) positive emojis when expressing their feelings toward Coca-Cola (vs Taco Bell). They also show that the new metric is highly and positively associated with the ACSI, hence supporting its validity. Research limitations/implications: The new metric is only applicable to brands that have a social media presence. Practical implications: The proposed metric is easy to implement and interpret by almost every researcher and manager. Originality/value: While all extant brand sentiment analyses focus on analyzing the words in brand-related user-generated content, this paper considers an alternative source of information about emotions, that is, emojis. Beyond being valid, the proposed emoji-based metric is unique, easy to implement and interpret, and generalizable.