To indicate laughter while surfing Facebook, do you write “lol,” “haha,” “hehe” or use a smiling emoji? To determine trends in “e-laughing,” Facebook researchers recently crunched some data.
In the last week of May, Facebook analyzed de-identified posts and comments with at least one string of characters that match laughter, including expressions like “haha,” “hehe,” “lol” and laughing emoji. Facebook’s researchers said they analyzed posts and comments, but did not pull data from direct messages through Facebook Messenger. About 15% of the Facebook users included some form of laughter in a post during that week and the most common “e-laugh” was “haha,” followed by laughing emoji and “hehe.”
The study — which was inspired by an article in The New Yorker about “e-laughter” —  determined that age, gender and geographic location also played a role in the laughter type and length. Emoji is generally used by young people and women. And men tend to “hehe” more often. People from Seattle and San Francisco prefer to use “hahas.” And people in Chicago and New York writing in emoji.
After finding out the percentage breakdown of the number of users that “e-laugh” on the social network, Facebook looked at how frequently it occurred. Around 46% of the people posted only one “e-laugh” during the week and 85% of them posted under five “e-laughs.” Of that sample, roughly 52% of people used a single “e-laugh” type and 20% used two different “e-laugh” types. In the chart below, it shows the number of different “e-laughs” people used — which is indicated by “unique”:

from Forbes – Tech http://ift.tt/1Ndh9jQ
via IFTTT