BBM’s Most Popular Emoji — and What It Says About Our Users

BBM users love their emoji. We use millions of them in chats every day. The chart below shows the most popular among BlackBerry OS/BBM users from a week in September.

A note of clarification: I’m using the terms “emoticons” to refer to the text-based character combinations meant to be read sideways — e.g., smiling, and “emoji” to refer to the related-but-different tiny graphics – e.g.   smiling. (And don’t forget the  hot dog.)

Most-Used Emoticons in BBM*

Emoticon     Emoji        Percent of Total Emoji

1.   =D             10.36%

2.   =))              10.16%

3.                   9.05%

4.   ({})              8.3%

5.                  6.86%

6.    :*                5.98%

7.     X_X           4.25%

8.      :p              3.74%

9.                  3%

10.                   2.53%

11.                 2.32%

12.     =D/        1.74%

13.    (y)             1.62%

14.     ;;)             1.57%

15.    3-|             1.49%

16.     =))            1.38%

17.    <3<3        1.26%

18.                    1.14%

19.    …