Clearly, using emojis within messages, tweets, and all kinds of communication has become very popular over recent years, particularly on mobile devices where emoji buttons and keyboards have become quite ubiquitous.
But what if you’re working from a desktop and hoping to add an emoji or two to a message?
We’ve got a little-known emoji tip just for you — one that is easy to remember and quick to use. In this post, we’ll cover the little-known shortcuts to share emojis from Mac and Windows desktop as well as sharing how to use emojis to boost your social media posts.
The 💜 of EU tech
The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!
Get ready for some fun!
How to add emojis on Mac (keyboard shortcut): CTRL + CMD + Space
1. Click on any text field
Position your cursor in any text field where you’d like to add an emoji. For example, you can do this in a Buffer post:
2. Press Command + Control + Space
Press the Command and Control keys on your Mac keyboard and then press Space:
3. Choose your emoji from the list
You’ll now see the emoji keyboard palette launch within your screen:
You can scroll through all the available emojis and categories (People, Nature, Food & Drink, Celebration, Activity, Travel & Places, and Objects & Symbols) or search the full list of emoji from the search box at the top of the window.
4. Click to add the emoji to your text
Once you’ve found the emoji you’d like to add, click on it and it’ll appear in your text box to the left of the cursor:
How to add emojis on Windows: Touch keyboard
1. Open the Touch Keyboard
Click on the Touch Keyboard icon in the bottom right corner of your screen:
One the keyboard window has opened up, click on the smiley face icon next to the Control button.
3. Choose your emoji
Your keyboard will now switch to an emoji keyboard and you can select the emoji you’d like to add to your text field:
How emojis can impact your social media content
Emojis are incredibly fun, and they can also help increase the reach of your social media posts and boost engagement.
For example, internet marketer Larry Kim ran a quick experiment where he split-tested the same promoted post with and without emojis to the same targeting group at the same time. The results of this experiment were pretty impressive. The emoji version had 25.4 percent higher engagement (11.06 percent vs. 8.82 percent) and a 22.2 percent lower cost per engagement ($0.18 vs. $0.14)
3 simple-yet-effective ways to use emojis in your marketing
1. As a response
Emojis can be a great way to respond to people on social media. Instead of simply ‘liking’ or ‘favoriting’ a post, an emoji can convey a specific emotion. For example, if something made you laugh, the :joy: emoji could be a great one to react with ?.
No matter the topic, there’s probably an emoji you can use to represent it. For example, if you’re sharing a video on social media you could use the video emoji to highlight that fact ?.
Here’s an example of how we used emojis when we shared a design-focused post on Facebook:
What used to take a few sentences can now be summed up using a few icons. In our social media updates, we regularly use emojis at the end of sentences to summarize the topic we’re talking about.
In the below example we used the ⏰ and ?emojis to essentially say “time is money.”
Over to you
The Mac emoji shortcut has saved me a ton of time since I discovered it and I hope these tips can help you save a little time and enhance your social media posts, too.
I’d love to hear any thoughts you may have in the comments below. How do you use emojis in your marketing?
Get the TNW newsletter
Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.
