For decades, emojis have shaped how we communicate online, but their popularity and meaning are constantly in flux. With social intelligence data marketers can learn more about how emojis are used over time, in different communities and contexts.
To learn more about how emoji usage has changed over the past year, we used our social listening and analytics solution to follow up on our 2023 analysis of the most-used emojis. Like last year, we examined mentions of 10 popular emojis in English-language social media posts across 15 platforms, including X, Reddit, and Instagram.
Here is how these emojis rank from least- to most-mentioned from January 1 through November 30, 2024:
10. 😊, or Smiling Face with Smiling Eyes
9. 🥰, or Smiling Face with Hearts
8. 😍, or Smiling Face with Heart-Eyes
7. ✨, or Sparkles
6. 🙏, or Folded Hands
5. 🤣, or Rolling on the Floor Laughing
4. ❤️, or Red Heart
3. 🔥, or Fire
2. 😂, or Face with Tears of Joy
1. 😭, or Loudly Crying Face
Let’s take a closer look to uncover more about the emojis that took over our digital communications this year.
Learn which emojis your audience uses most when talking about your brand, industry, or market with a demo of the Meltwater Suite.
Contents
What was the most-used emoji in 2024?
Which emojis were most popular on each social platform in 2024?
Which emojis were most popular in different countries in 2024?
Which new emoji was used most in 2024?
What was the most-used emoji in 2024?
😭, or loudly crying face, was the most-used emoji on social media in 2024, surpassing last year’s winner 😂, or face with tears of joy. From January 1 to November 30, 2024, 😭 was used about 761 million times across social media channels. Daily mentions spiked highest on November 23 when multiple posts featuring 😭 went viral on X.
As always, the top emoji on social media fluctuates, with some seasonal consistencies like ❤️ being the most popular emoji on Valentine’s Day. In 2024, there were two notable trends that we didn’t see last year.
First, 😂 briefly rose to become the most-used emoji on November 6, 2024, the same day it was announced that Donald Trump had won the U.S. presidential election.
Second, 🔥 was the most popular emoji on November 18, as well as from November 27 to November 29, due surges of posts on X about cryptocurrency, new music releases, and Hindu rights protests in Bangladesh. Otherwise, 😭 was the most popular emoji for most of the days in 2024.
What words are most associated with the top emojis of 2024?
The most common keywords mentioned alongside each emoji gives us a window into how they are often used. Some of these keywords remained consistent to last year:
- “love” was the top keyword for 🥰, ❤️, and 😍
- “fire” was the top keyword for 🔥
- “life” was the top keyword for 😭 and 😂
However, the top keywords changed for four out of the 10 emojis analyzed, highlighting how their associations have shifted. In 2024:
- “smile” was the top keyword for 😊, in 2023 it was “friend”
- “world” was the top keyword for ✨, in 2023 it was “life”
- “family” was the top keyword for 🙏, in 2023 it was “life”
- “video” was the top keyword for 🤣, in 2023 it was “life”
In general, these shifts point to how the emotional resonance of each emoji has evolved. More specifically, 🤣 seems to be growing more associated with funny videos than descriptions about life and personal experiences.
Check out our blog about the changing meanings of emojis to learn more about how consumers and marketers alike use them to communicate.
Which emojis were most popular on each social platform in 2024?
😭 was most popular on X, while 😂 took the top spot on Reddit and Facebook, as well as in comments. Interestingly, though ✨ was the seventh most popular emoji overall, it was the most-used one on Pinterest, Instagram, Twitch, and blogs. On Pinterest in particular, which had the highest volume of ✨ mentions, the emoji is the go-to way to give a pin a little pizzazz.
Get more stats on social media usage trends in our Global Digital Report.
Which emojis were most popular in different countries in 2024?
In 2023, we analyzed the top emojis for five countries with the highest volumes of English-language emoji usage. In 2024, two of those countries gained a new favorite emoji:
- The most popular emoji in the United States was 😭, in 2023 it was 😂.
- The most popular emoji in India was 🔥, in 2023 it was ❤️.
The most popular emoji in Nigeria and the United Kingdom, 😂, remained consistent from 2023 to 2024, as did South Africa’s top emoji, 😭. In the end, it seems that South Africa’s emoji users were ahead of the global curve.
Which new emoji was used most in 2024?
In 2024, Unicode, the organization behind emoji standardization, rolled out six new concepts along with four new family combinations. Our analysis focused on four of the new emoji concepts:
- 🙂↔️, or Head Shaking Horizontally
- 🙂↕️, or Head Shaking Vertically
- 🐦🔥, or Phoenix
- ⛓️💥, or Broken Chain
(Note: Some of these emojis may not appear correctly on your device depending on how up-to-date its operating system is.)
Of those emojis, 🙂↕️, or head shaking vertically, was the most popular by far, followed by 🙂↔️, or head shaking horizontally.
While all four emojis began with relatively the same amount of usage, 🙂↔️ and 🙂↕️quickly became the leading favorites. Since, April, however, 🙂↕️has consistently been the most popular of them all.
Looking at mentions by location reveals that 🙂↕️is the most popular new emoji concept in the United States, China, the United Kingdom, India, the Philippines, Thailand, South Africa, and France. Meanwhile, 🙂↔️is most popular in Nigeria and Indonesia. In 2025, as more mobile software updates bring these new emojis to more users, the usage of the head shaking emojis will only continue to take shape.
In 2025, as always, cultural, political, and social shifts will be reflected in how people communicate with one another, including how they use emojis. Stay ahead of those trends and start speaking your audience’s language — see how with a demo of the Meltwater Suite. 🙂