In a bid to cash in on the growing popularity for emojis, Twitter is testing the effectiveness of the freakish pictograms in helping to advertise brands.
The social network has teamed up with soft drink giant Coca-Cola for it, Wall Street Journal reported.
In the form of paid ad placement, an emoji of a pair of Coke bottles clinking has been appearing on Twitter for the last few days when users post a tweet with the hashtag #ShareaCoke.
Twitter will only be offering the feature to Coke and others as part of a package deal to its biggest clients that have already committed a certain amount of their ad budgets to Twitter.
@epikrika8332 Your virtual #ShareaCoke bottles are ready! Now you can share with friends! http://t.co/IvQBeDJyWk pic.twitter.com/wyRQgN75Xp
— Share a Coke With (@ShareaCokeWith) August 15, 2015
Twitter worked with Coke for six months on the project and is currently talking to 10 of its biggest brand clients about cashing in on the craze for weird faces and love-struck cats.
Although custom-built emojis have appeared on Twitter earlier too, but its alliance with Coke marks the first time a brand has paid Twitter to have an emoji made for a specific marketing campaign.
As part of its “Share a Coke” marketing campaign, Coke over the past few years has replaced periodically its brand name on bottles and cans with people’s names.
With the Facebook user base touching 1.49 billion – or roughly 20 percent of the world’s population – can any social networking site claim to be bigger than this? Well, Twitter does.
Although it has reported 316 million users in the second quarter – around five times less than Facebook’s figure – and its stocks not doing very well either, it did not deter Twitter’s chief financial officer Anthony Noto recently observing that Twitter was not behind Facebook, Quartz reported.
Noto’s remarks came during Deutsche Bank’s technology conference recently where he observed that Twitter is equal — or perhaps even bigger than Facebook — “depending on how you measure it”.
“I often get the question from friends [who] are like, ayou know Facebook has over a billion users’, and I am like, ‘well, we have an audience, depending on how you measure it, that’s pretty comparable,” he was quoted as saying.
“But they only have that audience, they only have the 1.4 billion they report, there’s no other number. We have other audience numbers that no one talks about and when you add those up it’s a big number, in fact in some scenarios you could argue that it’s bigger,” Noto added.
The “other numbers” that Noto was referring to are logged-out users (people visiting Twitter who don’t have accounts or don’t log in) and those who see syndicated or embedded tweets elsewhere.
In July, then-CEO Dick Costolo told analysts that half a billion logged-out users come to Twitter each month, and there are even more people who see tweets distributed via partners, such as CNN and ESPN.
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