They're used a bit differently to traditional emoticons - while emoticons are used to convey tone since text can be ambiguous, emojis tend to add 'flavour' to s

They're used a bit differently to traditional emoticons - while emoticons are used to convey tone since text can be ambiguous, emojis tend to add 'flavour' to some text - things like icons of food, drinks, animals etc - so they generally have very little purpose, but make a message more fun.