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humans simply aren’t moved to action by “data dumps,” dense PowerPoint slides, or spreadsheets packed with figures. People are moved by emotion.

over the last several decades psychology has begun a serious study of how story affects the human mind. Results repeatedly show that our attitudes, fears, hopes, and values are strongly influenced by story.

Fully 92 percent of all people online use emoji now, and one-third of them do so daily. On Instagram, nearly half of the posts contain emoji, a trend that began in 2011 when iOS added an emoji keyboard. Rates soared higher when Android followed suit two years later. Emoji are so popular they’re killing off netspeak. The more we use

In essence, we’re watching the birth of a new type of language. Emoji assist in a peculiarly modern task: conveying emotional nuance in short, online utterances. “They’re trying to solve one of the big problems of writing online, which is that you have the words but you don’t have the tone of voice,” as my friend Gretchen McCulloch, a linguist and author, says.

Of the 20 most frequently used emoji, nearly all are hearts, smilies, or hand gestures—the ones that emote. In an age of rapid chatter, emoji prevent miscommunication by adding an emotional tenor to cold copy.

The single-most engaging, and simple, content marketing strategy is to create a reason and method for your audience members to supply content. Whether you ask them to submit photos using your product or you’re posting an engaging question of the week and aggregating answers for a roundup blog post, you’re building in the emotional trigger: they are the content. When someone sees their own photo, their name and contribution, they share like a proud parent. It’s like your own “easy button” for creating engaging content.

Scientists have discovered that when we look at a smiley face online, the same parts of the brain are activated as when we look at a real human face. Our mood changes, and we might even alter our facial expressions to match the emotion of the emoticon.

Bitmojis could add a way to express how users feel when they aren't taking a selfie. Snapchat allows people to place standard emojis on photos and videos, but bitmojis purport to do a better job of showing emotion because there's a face -- albeit a cartoonish one -- attached. Snapchat could even generate revenue here, by charging users for special-edition bitmojis just as Bitstrips has done.

The bitmoji also could come into play in Snapchat's text chat feature, which is tucked away behind the image-sharing elements. Snapchat is said to be working on a major overhaul of texting that would bring audio chat and more. It's easy to see bitmojis being a part of that too, giving people a way to communicate visually without having to take photos themselves.