As if Twitter’s deal to stream NFL Thursday Night Football didn’t convince you that the social network was going all-in on the NFL, maybe this will.
Twitter announced today (a day before tomorrow’s NFL season opener) that they made a custom hashtag emoji for every NFL team. There is also a #TNF hashtag for Thursday Night Football that shows the NFL logo on a helmet. Like Twitter’s other emojis, these can be activated by tweeting a certain hashtag.
You can see all of the hashtags and emojis below, but not in the actual tweet, because for some reason Twitter doesn’t support these emojis within their Tweet embed product.
It seems that Twitter and the NFL decided to let each team pick their own hashtag, which may have backfired because most teams decided to use phrases that are super vague and probably only known to hardcore football fans.
For example, the Carolina Panthers choose #KeepPounding. While every Panther fan knows this is a motivational phrase the team has used since 2004, most people probably have no idea what it means. Same with #WeAre12 (which doesn’t even have the Seahawks’ logo as the emoji) and #HTTR.
Thankfully some teams decided to keep it simple (or had a really lazy social media manager) and just use their team’s name and logo for the hashtag and associated emoji, like the Super Bowl 50-winning #Broncos.
Anyways, hopefully these emojis will get you in the mood for football tomorrow. But if you want to watch on Twitter, you’re out of luck until next week, because even though Twitter will be streaming all Thursday Night Football games, tomorrow’s season opener isn’t considered part of the Thursday Night Football series (even though it’s on Thursday), so the game will only be on NBC.
#confusing
