CTV Advertising Strategies:

Insights from CTV leaders at Dentsu, Horizon Media and more

SECURE YOUR SEAT

Do you ‘haha’ or ‘hehe?’: How people laugh on Facebook in 5 charts

It’s a “haha” world and “LOL” is just living in it.

Facebook published a blog post last Thursday that dissected how people on the social network articulate their laughter with words and emoji since the behavior can’t be expressed using noises. Using posts and comments that it from the last week of May, Facebook poured through the data — which was rendered anonymous — to see which variations people use, including haha, hehe, lol and emoji.

Although people love to laugh (in fact, 15 percent of posts include some form of laugher), how they laugh actually depends where they live, their age and sex.

Here’s what Facebook discovered, in 5 charts:

LOL trails far behind haha, emoji in popularity.

chart1

A whopping 51 percent of people use haha’s (including its variants, hahaha, haahhaa, etc.), while emoji places second at nearly 34 percent with the serious sounding LOL trailing far behind at nearly 2 percent.

How people laugh depends on age.

agelaugh

In the chart above, the dashed line is the median showing that older people tend to use LOL, while younger people use emoji. Slightly older people (compared to emoji users) use haha and hehe tracks older than haha but not as elderly as LOL. So if brands want to look hip, use an emoji.

Where people are determines how they laugh.

location

The new East Coast vs. West Coast battle will be decided using haha’s. People on the left coast more frequently use haha and hehe, while the east gravitates toward emojis. The darker the green is, the more popular the variant is.

“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,” Facebook notes.

Cities are also a major factor, too.

cities

Facebook further drilled into the data by focusing on six cities, including Boston, Chicago, New York, Phoenix, San Francisco and Seattle. The chart above backs up their data in that Seattle deploys emoji the least of the other cities.

Women use emojis, men use haha.

gender

Both sexes evenly hehe and LOL, but women tends to use emoji more than men. Meanwhile, men use the surly sounding haha and hehe. LOL, however, has a brand problem since it placed very lowly for both sexes.

https://digiday.com/?p=130416

More in Media

Digiday+ Research: Publishers pull back their dependence on digital revenue

After a year in which publishers shifted their revenue dependence away from traditional channels and toward digital channels, 2025 has seen a shift back toward more of a balance between traditional and digital revenue sources.

LinkedIn makes it easier for creators to track performance across platforms

Creator data is becoming more accessible to third-party vendors via a new API — another step in LinkedIn’s creator platform evolution.

Ad Tech Briefing: The ‘plumbers’ posing as the unlikely saviors of the internet

After several false dawns, can Cloudflare’s ‘anti-AI scraping tool’ finally offer publishers a road to commercial redemption?