We laugh a lot here at Reed & Associates Marketing, but how can we not when we have these goons in the office?
We recently came across a very interesting Facebook blog post “The Not-So-Universal Language of Laughter” by Udi Weinsberg, Lada Adamic, and Melvin Develin. The post, published August 6, analyzed data from Facebook comments for a week to see which demographics used e-laughter, and which characters they chose to convey it. The characters analyzed included variants of haha, hehe, emoji, and lol.
Here’s what they found:
We were a little surprised that 13.1 percent of users chose hehe to convey laughter. We were also surprised that only 1.9 percent used lol, because people are loling all over our newsfeeds…mostly our moms. The data also shows that both women and men like to use variations of haha the most, followed by emojis, hehe and finally lol. Men tend to use haha and hehe more than women, but women use emojis much more than men, and of course, lol.
The study also discussed the age demographic of the users.
The dashed line represents the average age of users. So the average age of emoji users is early twenties, the haha-ers are slightly older, mid-twenties, the hehe-ers and the lol-ers are late twenties. Apparently not many people over thirty like to e-laugh! Inspired by these findings, we decided to do a little survey of our own to see if it applied to the R&A team. Turns out that most of us are in our early twenties! Or just acting like it…
So most of us here at R&A (50%) use haha. Two of us were difficult and wanted a new category of ha to be created in order to be more accurately represented. Can you guess who? (If you said Adam and Greg, you were right). We had three emoji users – the rest of us were lying because everyone uses emojis. No hehe-ers (because none of us are grandpas), and we had one lol-er, Gillian– no surprise there.
Here’s the break down of our average ages in relation to the e-laugh:
And here it is by gender:
The men at R&A only have time for one syllable laughs. Lively bunch.
So there you have it. Comparing our results to Facebook’s data results, we should all be early twenty year olds! Haha, ha, lol, 🙂 , We wish.
Tell us what characters you prefer to use when you e-laugh in the comment section below!
