The most popular emoji on iPhones & other iOS devices

Source:  Apple's Differential Privacy Overview, November 2017

Emoji 'reactions' account for 3% of Facebook Likes

"Back in February, after months of testing, research and quibbling about the design, Facebook excitedly launched the suite of five emoji reactions, from happy to sad, that lets people express their emotions on a post. Turns out, people aren’t using them.
Marketing firm Quintly analyzed 130,000 posts and found that 97 percent of the interactions on them included the use of like button, writing a comment or a share. That means just a measly 3 percent of the time people used a reaction option. The firm concludes that Reactions “are not used very frequently by the average user at this point.”"

Source:  Digiday, 4th May 2016

The most popularly used emoji in US TV-related Tweets

Source:  AdWeek, 20th November 2015

Percent of time emojis are used in Instagram text, by country

Source:  Instagram's engineering blog, 7th May 2015

Emoji popularity by category

Source:  Data from MdKinsey, reported by The Atlantic, 21st April 2015
Lots more data in the full article

Over 350m 'stickers' are shared each day on Facebook

"Over 350 million Facebook ‘stickers’ – illustrations or animations of characters – are shared everyday on the platform, signalling a new way of communicating that brands have yet to harness, according to Facebook VP EMEA Nicola Mendelsohn.
Speaking at the Guardian Changing Media Summit, Mendelsohn said the human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than words and this has seen an increasing number of users develop a “succinct visual language” to sustain pace in an increasingly busy world.
“Think of this as the next generation of ‘LOL’, where images replace words,” she said."

Source:  The Drum, 19th March 2015