Covent Garden has been challenging its Twitter followers to decode emoji-fied opera and ballet plots.

In celebration of World Emoji Day, The Royal Opera House has deployed a raft of emojis to tell the story of popular operas and ballets on its official Twitter account, with those correctly identifying the works entered into a draw to win a pair of performance tickets.

Posting a coded message every half hour on Monday, the Royal Opera House said it hoped partnering with Twitter on the special event would help the venue reach new audiences. The social media giant supported the endeavour by encouraging the initiative to trend, while Covent Garden promoted the competition via its Instagram and Facebook.

“We grab any opportunity to tell narratives and teaming up with Twitter means we do this at unprecedented scale”, said Covent Garden’s head of marketing communications, audiences and media Jeremy Paul. “It’s part of a strategy to pivot into dialogue-platforms like Twitter”.

Twitter’s UK managing director Dara Nasr said: “Every year we see emojis used billions of times on Twitter and...