Over the last five years, Twitter has introduced new ways of communicating on the platform, with GIFs, memes, videos, and more, but perhaps the most friendly and popular way of expressing oneself has become the emoji. While people on Twitter have always had access to a standard set of emojis, specific hashtags at different periods of time have activated a limited-time emoji for special occasions.
Custom emojis in India were first launched on the service in 2015 with 13 creative symbols to connect with audiences. Taking a cue from the popularity of these emojis, over the years this grew to 39 in 2016, 62 in 2017, 39 in 2018, 86 in 2019, and 50 in 2020 till September.
This International Internet Day, as we celebrate the evolution of conversations on the internet, here are some fun facts about custom emojis on Twitter India:
- Since 2015, there are almost 300 India centric custom emojis.
- Among these, almost 68% emojis were introduced for special Indian events and moment, for example, Independence Day, #CWC19, Indian festivals, and national and assembly elections.
-The first-ever Indian emoji was the #MakeInIndia emoji, introduced in Nov 2015.
- In 2016, the first-ever emoji activated by Indian languages was introduced. This emoji, launched for Diwali 2016. Over the years, several festival related and cultural emojis have been activated by hashtags in various Indian languages including Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, Urdu, Tamil, Telugu and Kannada.
- In April 2017, Twitter for the first-ever time came up with a custom personalised IPL emoji for all 30
players as part of the 10th anniversary celebrations of IPL.
- In the same month, the first-ever #AmbedkarJayanti emoji was launched on Twitter.
- This year, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (DDLJ) became the first Indian film to receive a custom emoji to commemorate the silver anniversary of the film.
- Salman Khan was the first Hindi film celebrity to have an emoji inspired by hisvcharacter in #Tubelight in May 2017.
- Elections that received the emoji included Lok Sabha Elections in 2019.
- Encouraging positive conversations on the service, Twitter India and Anushka Sharma together launched the #HappyTweets campaign to spread joy amongst people. The campaign was also supported with a custom heart emoji.
- In 2020, faced with the COVID-19 pandemic, audiences on Indian Twitter took a trip down the memory
lane and threw-back to some iconic moments from the ‘90s. To celebrate these conversations, Twitter
India launched an emoji that reminded everyone of the decade. The emoji was activated by using three
hashtags - #BackToThe90s, #90sLove, and #90sNostalgia.