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Google+ also enables marketers and writers to link content to their Google+ profile via its Authorship feature. Once the content is linked, the profile picture will appear next to the link in search results, which in turn, can help gather more page clicks and a higher search ranking.

“You don’t use Google+ in order to get in front of your prospects or your customers,” Herinckx said. “[Customers] are still using Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn because Google+ is so small. From an SEO standpoint, and from a paid search standpoint as well, Google will pull in information from Google+ into the search results, which helps your search result stand out.”

Having learned a good representation for emoji, we can begin to ask questions about similarity. Namely, for a given emoji, what English words are semantically similar? For each emoji, we compute the “angle” (equivalently the cosine similarity) between it and other words. Words with a small angle are said to be similar and provide a natural, English-language translation for that emoji.

Using our algorithm, we find that many of our popular emoji have meanings in-line with early internet slang:

It seems that the most popular emoji have similar semantics to words like “lol/hehe” (

Many clusters emerge: food emoji on the left, opposite the work emoji in the top right. Shoes (bottom right) are associated closely to handbags while bathing suits are closer to the water and marine animals (top left). Alcoholic drinks (bottom left) cluster together with bowling. Towards the center, we see a large clustering of facial expressions bordered by sadness, shock, laughter, happiness and coolness. As we travel downwards, we can see happy, love leading all the way the family and wedding emoji.

On Instagram, emoji are becoming a valid and near-universal method of expression in all languages. Emoji usage is shifting the people’s vocabulary on Instagram and becoming an important means of expression: their use is anti-correlated with internet slang like “lol” and “xoxo.”