37% of Australian Instagram posts now contain emoji

Australian social media users are increasingly turning to emoji to communicate, with Instagram publishing figures showing more than one-in-three Australian posts on the social photo app now use emoji.

The figures, published on Instagram’s official engineering blog, show emoji use surged after Apple introduced an emoji keyboard in October 2011, with use growing from nearly 0% to 20% in a matter of months.

The use of emoji further surged with Google’s release of Android 4.3 Jellybean in July 2013. While emoji had been available on a number of third-party keyboard apps, the release was the first time Google included the characters as part of its default stock Android keyboard.

However, when it comes to emoji use, Australian Instagram users trail most other countries.

In Finland, 63% of all Instagram posts contain emoji, with users in France (50%), the UK (48%), Germany (47%), Japan (39%) and the US (38%) all posting the ideograms at a more frequent rate than Australians.

Interestingly, Instagram has also noticed users who regularly post messages containing emoji are far less likely to use internet slang than other users.