Using emoji's by typing colon generates smileys too early

Question

When using Teams, I want to add emojis by using colons, ex. typing ":smile..." However, Teams is too quick to add a smiley, thinking that ":s" what I want (which is not), i.e. I end up with not being able to get/use the emoji I want... See picture (I don't want the smiley which appear in the red square)

enter image description here

Answer 1

Use parenthesis instead of colon e.g.

(nod)
(smile)