While in years past, July 17th was like any other day of the year, 2014 marked the inaugural annual celebration of #WorldEmojiDay.
Hot off the success of the first celebration, 2015 marked another opportunity for the world to promote the use of emoji and spread the enjoyment that they bring to all of those around us.
Our goal was to join the conversation in a relevant manner, and have some fun celebrating the day with MasterCard cardholders.
The importance of right message/right time/right audience is always top-of-mind for us. It's not just about joining a conversation because it's trending, but rather because we can add value in a manner that is relevant to our brand and our cardholders.
To ensure that we created a fun and engaging two-way dialogue around our consumers' passion points, we asked our Twitter followers to describe their perfect day, using only emoji. This strategy aimed to engage our fans to communicate in a language they so often use and provide us an opportunity to have some fun, continuing the 1:1 conversation in a way only fit for #WorldEmojiDay.
We shared our own beach vacation dream by creating a collage, solely made from emoji, in order grab attention in the news feed and get the conversation going.
We expected some participation with this organic-only Tweet, but were blown away by the excitement and creativity of our Twitter followers.
One after another, they responded with dreams of family vacations on the beaches of Mexico, enjoying burgers and beers at a ballgame, frolicking through an amusement park, relaxing spa days and shopping sprees! Each of their descriptions were met with a custom, personal emoji-only response from @MasterCard celebrating their goals. Some conversations even went back-and-forth multiple times between a single follower and our brand.
Our #WorldEmojiDay Tweet garnered an Engagement Rate of 3.4%, beating the Financial Services category benchmark (2.69%) by 26%.
Both PR Week and Clickz.com featured our post amongst the best global brand #WorldEmojiDay content.
