We built the Taco Emoji Engine, an interactive platform baked directly into Twitter. Just tweet a taco emoji plus any of the 1,295 other emojis at @TacoBell to get back a custom picture or GIF mashup.

We partnered with 77 artists worldwide to create custom content for all 1,295 possible emoji responses, to be ready for when the taco emoji was released. Yep, every single emoji has a response: all flags, all iOS exclusive emojis, and even emojis that have existed since 1991 have a response. The engine cannot be stumped.

The Taco Emoji Engine is always on and always lightning fast. Our responses are even featured in Twitter’s new GIF search button when you look for “taco.” Whip out your phone right now and tweet a taco and another emoji @TacoBell and see for yourself.

So how did the Taco Emoji Engine do?

Results:

- Our 11/9 launch date drove more brand mentions than any other day in Taco Bell’s history on Twitter

- Positive brand sentiment hit a yearly high

- More than 798,000 engagements and counting

- At its peak, the Taco Emoji Engine had 1,466 unique users, who played with the engine an average of 38.46 times

- More than half of our responses got retweeted

- One person tried 373 emoji combinations with the engine

- 22 billion total potential impressions

Using social listening, we saw 157,000+ posts about wanting the Taco emoji, which inspired us to create the Change.org petition in November 2014. Our initial target audience was the 33,000+ people who signed the petition and grew to include anyone with a taco emoji and a Twitter account.

Planning kicked off August 2015 and the engine launched November 9, for a total of four weeks of planning and nine weeks of asset production. Since emojis are a universal language, we built the Taco Emoji Engine directly into Twitter so all taco lovers everywhere could enjoy it.

In an emoji-crazed world, we noticed one huge problem: There was no taco emoji. So Taco Bell decided to do something about it. We started a Change.org petition. And it worked. The taco emoji was soon to be released on more than one billion screens worldwide.

So now we faced another challenge: How will we celebrate this victory with our fans? And how will we cement the taco emoji as shorthand for Taco Bell?