The Missing Ingredient to Personalising Your Content

Adam E. Badenhorst
3 min readDec 17, 2019
@lelia_milaya

I have been reading a few articles and felt something. I felt absolutely no connection to them and couldn’t understand why. I was thinking about the missing piece. I couldn’t put my finger on it until one day. It was thanks to one of my clients that asked me to work for her using one element that I didn’t every think about including in my writing. All of a sudden it clicked: Emojis.

“Emojiing” up your content

Adding an emoji or two to personalise your content makes a difference. Believe it or not, it’s a personal touch that provides some kind of visual feeling for the reader. You can take it as a chance to provide your personal touch and add depth to your writing— an angry face might be enough to express what you want to say. Or, you may want to add an angel to represent some kind of good feeling or innocent emotion that you want to evoke out of your readers.

How to use them

Now, it may seem apparently easy and hopefully it is. I had a to get a flavour of how to use them. The biggest lesson I learned is not to overuse the emojis. Like anything else, adding them into the text is nice, but not too many. The obvious reason for that suggestion is that it can confuse the reader and pollute your text.

The second thing you may want to consider is the placement in the text. Depending on the purpose, you could either place it at the end of the sentence or you could put it in the middle of the text. Personally, I have use them in both cases. It really depends on the context and how I want to convey the emotion.

Finally, make to write naturally and add the emojis in a way that you would be smiling, smirking, or making any other body language in a conversation. I say that for the simple fact that you obviously choose (or at least you should) how you react to different messages and stimuli. Well, emojis are the same — in formal content like a business plan document they may not be appropriate while in a blog post, it’s a better use case.

Bottom line, please use your best judgment.

Final Thoughts

Making content more personal is key. In an effort to connect more with your readers, you can add emojis. Emojis should be included in such way that they do not disrupt the flow of the text. More importantly, they should be used moderately so as not to distract the reader. Finally, have fun with them in your writing.

About me: I am a copywriter and storyteller who also manages various projects. I enjoy writing and always looking to improve and collaborate. I am an avid freelancer and looking to become a full time entrepreneur. You can follow me here on Medium or connect with me on LinkedIn.

Adam E. Badenhorst

Enterpreneur. IT & Heritage Consultant disrupting industries. AI, blockchain, SaaS, ERP.