In today’s Boolean BTS, we’re taking a look at the Meltwater blog’s breakdown of 2023’s Top 10 Emojis on social media. For that post, our team used Meltwater to analyze the usage of the top 10 emojis of 2023 according to Emojipedia’s mid-year rankings in English-language social media posts. Now I get to be the one to share the boolean you’ll need to perform these searches on your own. 
How to do social listening for emojis
Social media-specific operators, including emojis, are vital for ensuring you’re paying attention to the right conversations. For example, it can help you stay ahead of a crisis by including emojis associated with anger or fear to your searches (example: emojis:
, or you can find a few other examples in our Boolean Library).
Fortunately, the emoji operator makes searching an absolute breeze. To set up each emoji search, the steps and even the boolean operators will all be the same. Here are the steps you’ll need to follow for each emoji you’d like to track:
Step 1: Create an Advanced Search in Explore
Step 2: Copy and paste the boolean for the emoji you’re searching into Explore.
Here are the ones our team used for the blog:
| Emoji | Description | Boolean |
 | Smiling Face with Smiling Eyes | emojis: NOT (RT OR QT) |
 | Sparkles | emojis: NOT (RT OR QT) |
| 🥰 | Smiling Face with Hearts | emojis:🥰 NOT (RT OR QT) |
 | Smiling Face with Heart-Eyes | emojis: NOT (RT OR QT) |
 | Folded Hands | emojis: NOT (RT OR QT) |
 | Fire | emojis: NOT (RT OR QT) |
 | Red Heart | emojis: NOT (RT OR QT) |
 | Rolling on the Floor Laughing | emojis: NOT (RT OR QT) |
 | Loudly Crying Face | emojis: NOT (RT OR QT) |
 | Face with Tears of Joy | emojis: NOT (RT OR QT) |
Step 3: Apply Filters
- To limit your search to social media, next to “Filter set” below the search box, click “Source type” and select all types except for Blogs, Broadcast, Comments, Forums, News, Podcasts, Product Reviews, Request for Proposal, and RSS.
- Click the Language dropdown and select English.
Pro tip: once you’ve set up your filters on your first search, click the “Filter set” dropdown and select “Save As” to save the filter set. Now, you can use the “Filter set” dropdown to immediately apply all of these filters to your other searches
Step 4: Save your search and return to the Explore home page
If you title each of these as “Emoji:” followed by their descriptive text, it will make creating a comparison search super quick and easy!
How to visualize and compare 2023’s top emojis
Our team used a few different share of voice comparison insights in the blog. Here’s how you can create a comparison search:
Step 1: From the Explore home page, click “Create” on the “Compare Search” tile
Step 2: Select “Add Search” to add each of your individual emoji searches
If you titled them all “Emoji:” followed by their description, they’ll all be grouped together in your list of searches, making this super easy
Step 3: Adjust the date range
The blog used January 1 through November 30, 2023 - if you’re looking to replicate those results, do the same - otherwise, do whatever you find interesting!
The blog used these particular visualizations to analyze cultural context:
- Share of Voice by Mentions
- Share of Voice by Source
- Share of Voice by Location
Sound off in the comments 
- I mentioned using “angry” or “afraid” emojis in searches to assist in crisis management - what’s another use case for emojis in Explore?
