Research company Canvs is adding Instagram to the social media it studies to gauge emotional responses among viewers for its TV programming and advertising clients.

Canvs also said it has figured out how to read and analyze emojis, giving it extra insights into what young Generation Z consumers are feeling. Harnessing that information about emotional responses has proved powerful in predicting program ratings and commercial recall.

Adding the fast growing social-media platform to the company’s current data from Twitter and Facebook provides clients with a more balanced look at social media activity, Stuart Schwartzapfel, Canvs chief strategy officer, said.

Much of Instagram’s content is visual, making it more difficult to quantify and analyze posts than on Facebook or Twitter.

“It is heavily visual, but there is a scalable amount of commentary, either in the form of rich text or emoji usage that we’re seeing as pretty scalable on Instagram,” Schwartzapfel says.

Canvs found that about half of the messages on brand pages — including those of TV networks — include emojis, making understanding them imperative.

Canvs’s data science team did a study across Instagram and social media at large to understand which emojis are most prevalent, and it identified 1,000 emojis that are most commonly used.

Read more at broadcastingcable.com.