People are sharing a lot on social media. From our latest milestone to our rants about the TV show we just finished, we bear our souls on these public forums we call social media more than ever before.

The vast majority of what we post—thoughts, memes, and videos—can even correspond to distinct emotional states. Emojis are the best example of this emotional shorthand.

So, what if we looked at emoji usage and their associated emotions from a high level? 

According to The Emotions Report from Brandwatch, we can gain insights into consumers’ emotional states during certain times and toward specific industries. For example:

• Joy was the most shared feeling on social media, beating out anger, surprise, fear, sadness, and disgust. Joy was also expressed toward all industries on a similar level.
• People seemed to hit “peak joy” around 4 p.m. (maybe that getting-out-of-work-soon feeling?)
• People do not express a lot of negative emotions about fashion, when compared to other industries.
• Fear was expressed almost 10% more compared to the previous year.
• People express massive amounts of sadness when they post about TV.

Note: Our only nitpick with Brandwatch’s report is that anger is represented by light blue/cyan, while sadness uses red. Guess we better go share that on our Facebook page.

When measuring your brand’s success on social media, make sure you take audience emotions (usually called “audience sentiment” in marketing analytics) into account. For example, looking at customer sentiment when measuring engagement can give those conversations more context. What if you’re getting lots of attention—but the emotions of those having that conversation are largely negative?

What emotions do your products/services, marketing, and customer experience evoke from consumers?