seojeek

· Blog

Do emojis get more engagement on Instagram? I checked the research.

We add a 🦄 every time the Dayoff account mentions Dayoff in a comment. Before dropping it, I wanted to know whether emojis actually help. Here's what the studies say, and what they don't.

On the Dayoff Instagram account, we have a small rule: whenever a comment mentions Dayoff, the name is followed by 🦄. It looks like our mascot, and it started as something I did by hand. A typical comment ends with something like "This is why I'm building Dayoff 🦄".

Lately I've been wondering whether to drop it. The same name and emoji at the end of comment after comment starts to look like a stock line, and a stock line is the last thing you want when you're commenting on strangers' posts. "Unicorn" also means something specific in dating circles, which isn't a great fit for a friendship app.

But I had one real concern before changing anything: do emojis actually get more engagement? If they do, dropping the unicorn could cost us. So I went looking for evidence.

Here's the short version:

  • There's some evidence that emojis help. Posts with emojis tend to get more engagement than posts without them.
  • It depends on the emoji and the context. Some kinds of emojis are linked to less engagement, and using a lot of them doesn't help.
  • Nobody has tested what we actually do. The studies look at captions and brand posts, not a signature emoji added to a brand name in comments on other people's posts.

What the research says

Quintly's industry analysis

The number you'll see quoted most often comes from Quintly, a social media analytics company. They looked at 20,000 Instagram profiles and 6.2 million posts from 2016, and found that posts with emojis had a 17% higher interaction rate than posts without them.

That's a big dataset, but it has limits. It's an industry analysis, not peer-reviewed research. It shows that emojis and engagement go together, not that emojis cause it. Accounts that use emojis might just be different kinds of accounts. And the data is ten years old now, which is a long time on Instagram.

A peer-reviewed study of brand posts on Instagram

Ko, Kim and Kim published a study in Computers in Human Behavior in 2022 that looked at a large set of brand-related posts on Instagram. Overall, posts with emojis got more engagement. The details are more interesting than the headline, though:

  • Emotional emojis (faces, hearts) were linked to more engagement only when the text was already positive.
  • Informational emojis, the ones that stand in for a thing or an idea, were linked to less engagement in that same context.
  • Too many emojis hurt. The authors found that heavy use worked against engagement.

So "use emojis" is too simple. Which emoji, next to which words, matters.

A 2025 study that looked at replies

The closest match to what we do comes from Diogo Koch Alves and Anirban Mukhopadhyay at Bayes Business School, presented at the European Marketing Academy conference in 2025. They analyzed more than 96,000 social media posts from nine major global brands and split emojis into two kinds:

  • Social emojis express emotion and build relationships, like 😊 and ❤.
  • Non-social emojis add playful emphasis, like 🌟 and 📱.

In posts sent to all followers, social emojis increased engagement compared with plain text, and non-social emojis decreased it. But when brands replied publicly to an individual person, which the authors call "public narrowcasting," it flipped: non-social emojis led to larger engagement increases than social ones, although the effects were smaller.

A unicorn after a brand name is about as playful and non-social as emojis get, and our comments are much closer to replies than to broadcasts. So this one mildly supports keeping it.

What the research doesn't tell you

Before you act on any of this, keep a few gaps in mind.

  • It's mostly about posts, not comments. Quintly and Ko et al. looked at captions. Comments on someone else's post are a different situation: the reader didn't follow you, and your comment is one of many.
  • It measures likes and comments. What matters for us is whether someone taps through to the Dayoff profile, and whether they sign up. None of these studies measure that.
  • It's correlation. These studies find patterns in existing posts. They don't run experiments where the only thing that changes is the emoji.
  • Nobody tested a repeated signature. All of these studies compare emojis with no emojis, or one kind with another. None of them looked at the same emoji attached to the same name every time.

What I'm taking from it

The research doesn't say emojis are a mistake. If anything, it says a playful emoji in a reply is fine. What it doesn't support is a rule that puts the same emoji after the same word every time.

So the change we made is small: keep emojis, including the unicorn, but stop requiring it. We use 🦄 when the comment is already playful, mention Dayoff plainly when it isn't, and word every mention differently.

Ideally we'd test it on our own account, with the unicorn in some comments and not in others. We don't post enough yet for that comparison to mean much, so for now we're going with what the research supports and what reads naturally.

If you run a brand account

A few things I'd take from this, whatever you're promoting:

  • Pick emojis that fit the words. Warm emojis go with warm text. Don't add an emoji just to have one.
  • Use fewer. One well-placed emoji does more than a row of them.
  • Be playful in replies. When you're talking to one person, a little fun reads better than a stock heart.
  • Watch for patterns. Anything you repeat in every comment, emoji or phrase, starts to look automated. Vary it.
  • Test on your own account. These studies are averages across other brands. Your audience is the one that counts.

Sources