The New Eight Emojis Twitter Created For #MarchMadness
Today, Twitter is unveiling its March Madness-themed emojis, and on Selection Sunday, when the 68-team NCAA men's basketball tournament field is unveiled, they will be available to all users of the social media platform.
There are eight:
#MarchMadness
#LetsDance
#Cinderella
#BracketBusted
#Sweet16
#Elite8
#FinalFour
#NationalChampionship
Curious how the hashtag-triggered emojis were created and developed, USA TODAY Sports spoke with Andrew Barge, the Sports Partnerships Manager at Twitter, who also worked with the NBA for its recent All-Star Game. There were 1.7 million tweets that included NBA All-Star and Turner Sports hashtag-triggered emojis during All-Star weekend last month.
Clearly, people like these emojis. People also like March Madness.
“Big events, like March Madness — which was 9.1 billion impressions on Twitter last year — there's a lot of really solid foundational data around these big events,” Barge said. “You know what users gravitate towards in terms of keywords and hashtags. Emojis aim to amplify that existing value place in that conversation. It's a very collaborative process with Twitter products, Twitter design, engineering, as well as our media partners, Turner Sports and the NCAA.
“We really tap into their valuable expertise on their fans and the event itself, and figuring out what fans are all ready going to be talking about, so we can make sure that emojis are reaching people at scale, and then really further incentivizing more tweet expression that way.”
Twitter also has its own measurement tools to see which hashtags have been most popular in the past. This collaboration led to the eight hashtags listed above, conversations about the creativity of the images themselves, and their creation (and use across multiple platforms). The #NationalChampionship image is one of the actual championship trophy, so there was extra attention to detail and collaboration with Turner Sports and the NCAA to make sure it looked accurate.
Twitter’s sports emojis first appeared around the World Cup in 2010. Called “hashflags” at the time, they were three-letter country code hashtags that unlocked a small country flag associated with the country code, a “very straightforward execution,” Barge said. The hashflags returned for both the 2014 men's World Cup and the the 2015 women's World Cup.
“We saw a massive global reception to that product,” he said. “Obviously, it was on a massive stage like the World Cup, but there's a very obvious opportunity for us to scale the product a bit more to more individual events and gauge user reception from there. Especially in the sports space, we've been very encouraged by the fan reaction to the personality-based product. …
“There's a lot of surprise and delight involved in emojis. We've invested in them, on the product side, to a point where they're a really fun and interactive way for fans to express themselves. They're tied to major cultural moments that are unfolding live on the platform. Because they eventually go away after the moment passes, the products give users that real-time, in-the-moment feeling that's really distinct to Twitter.”
Twitter will also be adding a standalone March Madness tab in Twitter moments, which will help fans catch up on any major plays or storylines they might have missed.
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