Sunday 17th July brought us International Emoji Day, and to mark the occasion, Instagram and Twitter shared some new emoji usage insights, which could help to get you thinking about your emoji use.

Let’s be honest, virtually everyone uses emojis now – even your parents and grandparents enjoy giving the odd smiley face a go! And the stats seem to prove this with emoji usage rising every year.

Instagram has chosen to focus on sports with its Emoji Day insights, with the most popular sports emojis in the app based on usage in different regions.

Note that football actually comes out above all of these, and we would also suggest that the visual nature of the app also plays a part in which emojis are most used in each region.

Over on Twitter, the Twitter Business handle also shared its own display over the weekend of its most used emojis.

Today is one of the most important social media holidays… #WorldEmojiDay

To celebrate, we wanted to share with you our most used emojis of 2022!

Share with us your 3 most used emojis pic.twitter.com/3gx04VXNcx

— Twitter Business (@TwitterBusiness) July 17, 2022

It’s interesting to consider which emojis are your own most used, and what that says about your presence. Though Twitter also has the advantage of being able to extract this data into a word cloud, which is not easy without API access – but you likely know which are your most used emojis via your own process.

In general, however, the most used emojis within tweets are the ‘crying’, ‘laughing while crying’ and ‘concerned’ faces.

Those trends shifted over the last year or so, with the pandemic causing a change in general sentiment. But in most cases, these are the most commonly used emoji characters.

Though if you want more specific perspective:

That’s a lot to take in, but you can find more region-specific notes and insight here.

And finally, adding a little more emoji usage insight, Emojipedia has also awarded its 2022 World Emoji Awards:

• Most Popular New Emoji – Awarded to an emoji approved in 2020, the ‘Heart on Fire’ emoji came out on top
• Most Anticipated Emoji – Users are apparently most looking forward to the ‘melting face’ emoji more than any other

• Most 2021 Emoji – The syringe emoji was voted the most representative visual of 2021
• Lifetime Achievement – The most used emoji, old or new, is the ‘Loudly Crying Face’, which, as per above, is also very popular on Twitter

It’s interesting to note the most used emojis, and how consistently they’ve appeared in such lists.