The study was short-term, spanning only the last week of May, but the results were overall positive. The gist of the study is that Facebook users laugh a lot and in a variety of different ways.
An article in The New Yorker examining the variances in e-laughter inspired researchers at Facebook to delve in further and break it down with cold, hard data.
The study was short-term, spanning only the last week of May, but the results were overall positive. The gist of the study is that Facebook users laugh a lot and in a variety of different ways.
Roughly 15 percent of people who commented or posted a status while the study was being conducted virtually laughed in one way or another. Of the e-laughers, 20 percent used two different forms while 52 percent stayed faithful to one form.
Users were then broken down into one of four categories depending on what they favored: LOL, haha, hehe and emoji. Each category also included deviations like hehehe or lolz.
Haha-ers far outweighed the others accounting for 51.4 percent of users, emojis were second with 33.7 percent, hehe came in at 13.1 percent and LOL was dead last with a measly 1.9 percent.
Which category you fall in could depend on a couple of different things i.e., age, gender and geographic location.
Women, for example, used emojis and LOLs more than their male counterparts. As The New Yorker posited, men preferred to use hehe more than women.
The median age of an emoji user is about 23 years old and the graph skews higher as it moves from haha-ers to hehe-ers to LOL-ers, who were the oldest with a median age of about 27.
In Florida, Facebook users love their emojis, with LOLs -- the favorite among most Southern states -- was just a hair behind, hehe was next and haha was last, proving once again that Floridians don't exactly fit into the standard mold.
Facebook's study was extremely thorough, but it didn't account for other forms of expressing amusement and it didn't account for sentiment. I'm guessing at least some of those hehe's were either sarcastic or devious.
The study was short-term, spanning only the last week of May, but the results were overall positive. The gist of the study is that Facebook users laugh a lot and in a variety of different ways.
Roughly 15 percent of people who commented or posted a status while the study was being conducted virtually laughed in one way or another. Of the e-laughers, 20 percent used two different forms while 52 percent stayed faithful to one form.
Haha-ers far outweighed the others accounting for 51.4 percent of users, emojis were second with 33.7 percent, hehe came in at 13.1 percent and LOL was dead last with a measly 1.9 percent.
Which category you fall in could depend on a couple of different things i.e., age, gender and geographic location.
Women, for example, used emojis and LOLs more than their male counterparts. As The New Yorker posited, men preferred to use hehe more than women.
The median age of an emoji user is about 23 years old and the graph skews higher as it moves from haha-ers to hehe-ers to LOL-ers, who were the oldest with a median age of about 27.
In Florida, Facebook users love their emojis, with LOLs -- the favorite among most Southern states -- was just a hair behind, hehe was next and haha was last, proving once again that Floridians don't exactly fit into the standard mold.
Facebook's study was extremely thorough, but it didn't account for other forms of expressing amusement and it didn't account for sentiment. I'm guessing at least some of those hehe's were either sarcastic or devious.
