Smiley Emoji Popularity on Twitter
About This Chart
Data Visualization Method
- Data: Monthly popularity of smiley and expression emojis on Twitter, using observed monthly values rather than modeled or smoothed figures.
- Measure: For every 10,000 tweets, the number of tweets that contained a given emoji at least once. A tweet counts once for an emoji no matter how many times the emoji appears inside it, so a value of 200 means roughly 200 of 10,000 tweets carried that emoji.
- Period and area: 114 observed months, from March 2013 to March 2023, drawn from activity on Twitter.
- Selection: The dataset holds 112 candidate emojis in the smiley and expression family; the moving chart shows the top 18 at each point in time.
- Processing: Public monthly values were reshaped into a wide-format series for an animated ranking. Seven missing months were left as gaps rather than interpolated. The on-screen counter shows the year only to reduce visual noise, but the underlying resolution stays monthly.
- Chart form: An animated bar chart race in which each emoji is its own identifier. Value labels are removed, so magnitude is read from the horizontal scale rather than printed numbers.
Creator's Note
The goal was to place a decade of smiley-emoji use on a single comparable field and let the ranking move on its own. An all-emoji race was considered first, but a reliable full-category monthly series could not be assembled without forcing unrelated sources together, so the smiley family was kept as its own standalone chart instead.
Near the top, 😂 and 😭 trade places through the early 2020s before 😂 settles back in front. It is a small race the chart shows directly, so it is left for the viewer to watch rather than narrated in full here.
Data Sources
The usage figures come from Emojipedia's public emoji time series, based on an analysis of roughly 6.5 billion tweets. The underlying sample originates from the Internet Archive's Twitter 1% stream grab.
- Emojipedia's ten-year emoji review — monthly usage series.
- Emojipedia's all-time-high report — supporting usage figures.
- Unicode Emoji 15.0 (emoji-test.txt) — name and code-point verification.
- Twemoji 15.1.0 — emoji graphics, licensed CC BY 4.0. This is the image source only, kept separate from the usage data.
Limitations
Twitter users are not a representative sample of the world's population, and both the makeup of that user base and the way people posted shifted across the ten-year span. Movement in the chart reflects behavior on one platform, not a global mood.
The seven missing months are shown as gaps and were not connected or filled in, so no estimated or interpolated points stand in for real observations. The counter displays the year alone for readability, while the data behind it remains monthly.
This is a smiley and expression dataset, not a complete monthly history of every emoji category. It should not be read as the history of the most-used emojis worldwide.
What This Chart Doesn't Show
The value is the number of tweets that contained an emoji, not the total number of times the emoji was typed. It is also not the share of emotions people actually felt — only how often a given emoji appeared in tweets.
The measure does not separate tone or intent: irony, memes, and mixed feelings all sit inside the same count. Rank and timing can be read from the chart, but the reasons behind any rise or fall cannot.