‘Haha’ trumps ‘lol’ as most used laugh expression on Facebook

The study focused on Facebook posts and did not include direct messages, where users would be more likely to “e-laugh”, the Daily Mail reports. The “haha” laugh was also found to be the most popular way of conveying the emotion, and that more men than women prefer to use it.

Facebook has more of a breakdown here.

About 52 per cent of people used a single type of laugh and roughly 20 per cent used two different types.

In total, about 15 per cent of the social network’s users posted some kind of digital laughter in the week the researchers analysed.

Only a tiny 2 per cent posted “lol“, which was once the go-to phrase for online laughing.

Well now you can tell exactly how your e-laughing compares with the average joe’s, after Facebook [fortune-stock symbol=”FB”] published an analysis on it’s research blog.

As the pie chart shows, the haha-ers were followed by the next biggest group of emoji lovers at 33.7 per cent.

Facebook’s Data Researchers have shown that when it comes to the preferred form of online laughter “Haha” leads by far, followed by Emojis, Hehe and finally LoL.

Location also played a part. We did the matching with regular expressions which automatically identified laughter in the text, including variants of haha, hehe, emoji, and lol2.

“Presidential campaigns, take note: the battleground states of Ohio and Virginia are haha states, while the candidates” emoji games will surely be key in determining who emerges victorious in Florida.’.

The study confirmed this, showing that the peaks in the even numbers indicate that people treat the has and hes as building blocks, and usually prefer not to add extra letters.