Are you more of a “hahaha” or a “hehehe” person? Or do you prefer a well-placed emoji over both? Facebook has been busy crunching the data to come up with a picture of how its users express laughter online, and it’s published the findings in a blog post. It turns out that how you “LOL” online depends on your age, gender, and location.
First of all, “haha” (or some similar variant) is the most popular type of e-laugh on the Facebook network — it accounted for some 51.4 percent of online laughter during the period Facebook used for its testing. Emoji laughs came in second with 33.7 percent, “hehe” was fourth with 13.1 percent, and the venerable “LOL” came in last with a mere 1.9 percent.
There isn’t much distinction between the age groups, but the younger you are the more likely it is that you’re a fan of expressing laughter through emoji. The classic “LOL” was preferred by older people, which may give you some idea of why it’s on the way out — no one wants to e-laugh in the same way their parents or grandparents do online.
What about the length of our laughs? In general, people extend their “hahas” more than their “hehes”, with the six-letter “hahaha” particularly common. The data shows “LOL” usually stands on its own, and it’s a comforting thought that we might have seen the back of “LOLZ” for good. Emoji is the most concise form of online laughter, with a single picture rather than a series used 50 percent of the time.
In the battle of the sexes, women tend to prefer emoji and “LOL”, whereas the men have a preference for “haha” and “hehe”, although there’s not much in it. As for geographical regions, the population of the west coast of the U.S. is definitely all about the “haha” and “hehe,” whereas emoji are more common in the midwest.
[Header image courtesy of igor.stevanovic/Shutterstock.com]
