Soon the holidays starts, and I wondered if I could tell by looking at data from Instagram. Can we see a significant difference in the usage of holiday-related emojis and hashtags? Let’s find out!
To facilitate execution of global, large-scale influencer marketing campaigns at Relatable we rely a lot on data to give us insights. Using a sample of about 2 million Instagram accounts (with a minimum of 1,000 followers) and 40 million posts I’ve been digging deep compiling statistics, getting insights, or discovering some quirky facts — all of which I’m sharing in a number of articles.
My other article looked at emoji hashtag usage, so my next thought was if emoji usage, in general, would change depending on the time of the year.
Using 40 million Instagram posts, I looked at the relative occurrences of some celebratory emojis in the caption of posts. Then the result was plotted as a graph where the time of the post determined it’s position on the x-axis.
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That’s a significant difference! The use of the 🎄 emoji exploded over the week around Christmas, as did the use of hashtag #xmas.
During the Christmas week 5.5% of all Instagram posts featured an 🎄 emoji. Compared to less than 0.001% during the rest of the year.
The first signs that we approach the holiday season can be seen already in October, and then really takes off in November. Apparently, we look forward to Christmas a lot, but once it is over, we leave it behind very quickly (as seen on the sharp decline).
Use of the 🎅 emoji peaks during Christmas, but is far from being as popular as the 🎄. Maybe more people like to decorate a Christmas tree rather than dressing up as Santa?
The 🎁 is quite frequently used throughout the year, often associated with words like gift, birthday, but also giveaway and buy. Besides over Christmas, it does have a bump in usage in August. I wonder why, do you know?