The Effect of Emojis on the Popularity of Tweets Posted by Professional Sports Teams

Abstract

Emojis are gaining popularity both in messages and on social media. They are now used to enhance text in addition to replacing it. This paper aims to find the effects emojis have on retweets and favorites for tweets posted by professional sports teams. For this study, 50 sports teams were selected with 100 tweets sampled from each. The different sports included football, basketball, baseball, hockey, and soccer. The data included: whether the tweet contained an emoji; if the emoji replaced a word; if that tweet contained a video, photo, gif, player, or hashtag. Once the tweets were collected, I used Stata to analyze the data based on a linear as well as a Poisson regression. Interestingly, an emoji is not statistically significant when used as a predictor of favorites and retweets. However, when an emoji is used, whether or not it replaces words is significant, and remains significant under various model specifications. Specifically, when an emoji takes the place of typed text, favorites and retweets will largely decrease, possibly indicating that when emojis are used instead of text they become confusing to the reader. Other results include that the presence of media (video, photo, gif) and the mentioning of a player are positively correlated with the number of favorites and retweets. These findings allow a sports team to craft the ideal tweet, receiving a larger number of favorites and retweets, potentially increasing the fan base and sales.