In honor of World Emoji Day, Messenger announced the launch of new “sound emoji,” which are emoji that play a short audio clip, providing another interactive element to your messages.
👏#Soundmojis, the way to share what words just can’t! 👏 pic.twitter.com/0OOlRhAFtP
— Messenger (@messenger) July 15, 2021
As you can see here, Soundmojis added to a message also play an audio clip that the recipient will hear when they receive the message.
As Facebook explains:
“[Soundmojis are] next-level emoji that allow you to send short sound clips ranging from claps, crickets, drum rolls and angry laughter to audio clips of your favorite artists like Rebecca Black and your favorite TV shows and movies like F9 from Universal Pictures, Brooklyn Nine-Nine from NBC and Universal Television, Bridgerton from Netflix and Shondaland in Messenger chat.” “Ah, the drama in all of this.
This could be a fascinating and interesting addition to your chat topics that could end up being a big hit for the app – as long as you don’t suddenly blast the office or the train car with the eerie sound of a ghost.
Facebook claims that people send more than 2.4 billion emoji messages to Messenger every day, so using this feature makes sense, and since more people are more open to audio elements now than in the past (88% of TikTok users, for example, say that sound is important to the TikTok experience), this could be the perfect time to take emoji to the next level, and the inclusion of commercials also points to another opportunity for Facebook to turn this into a marketing opportunity that could have some solid
For example, you could imagine that a popular ad campaign could distribute certain quotes or clips to Soundmojis to reinforce their branding. This wouldn’t be something all brands can use, but for big campaigns or those that suddenly gain momentum and inspire people to quote and link, it could be an additional consideration.
At this stage, Facebook hasn’t yet revealed how brands will be able to do this, but given the aforementioned links, the company is probably already developing this feature for the broad market.
If you want to check out Soundmoji’s features, after updating the Messenger app, you can click on the emoji to open the expression menu and then select the loudspeaker icon. From there, you’ll be able to view and send your Soundmoji stickers.
Facebook says it will continue to update its Soundmoji library, which will include popular and well-known voices to add to your audio response options.
In addition to this, and in conjunction with World Emoji Day, Facebook has introduced an overview of the most popular food and drink emoji used on Facebook, which may add some context to your planning.
Or not. It’s a pretty basic overview, with few details, but it provides another interesting data point, highlighting emoji use, which may further indicate that Soundmojis are a winner for the platform.
It will be interesting to see how Facebook goes about this, and how open users will be to Soundmoji clips. This could be an important addition, both for regular users and for brands.
We hope to get usage statistics from Facebook in the near future.
