Businesses Take Note: “Lol” Is Over

Studies show that the way we’re laughing online is changing; be sure you’re not “lol”-ing too late!

It’s official: we’re not “lol”-ing anymore. Facebook recently completed a study into the way we laugh online and has ruled that “lol” is in fact now dead. In its place “haha” is taking the lion’s share of our digital laughter at 51.4%, while laughing emojis are hot on the heels of “haha” with 33.7% of the laughs. One thing’s for certain: “lol” will not be having the last laugh with a meagre 1.9% share in the online revelry stakes.

But how does this relate to business?

Nowadays a business without a prolific social media presence is considered uncool or archaic: if you don’t join the conversation around your brand then you’re at risk of letting it run riot. “Lol”, an acronym meaning “laugh out loud”, surfaced in the early days of email and mobile communications as a way for us to communicate our laughter without straining our digits too much. Its continued popularity spread to the internet when teens got to grips with social media, and the older generation joined in too.

Businesses need to have an understanding of how their customers are talking – especially online – to hope to engage with them. In today’s business climate it’s not enough to make sure your phones are manned and ready for customer interaction in the week’s working hours; your brand should be plugged into the online conversation around the clock. Social listening is a valuable tool to help you gauge how well your brand is received by tapping into organic conversation, and it is your duty as a business to truly understand the sentiment of this conversation.

So it stands to reason that this news about the way we laugh online is important for businesses who aspire to be relevant and engage with a contemporary audience: if you hope to engage with today’s Twitterzens, ditch the text-talk. However, this is not to say that you should ditch the “lol”-worthy content whatsoever. Indeed, Facebook’s study showed that 15% of people included laughter in a post or comment over the week that they conducted the study.

Although social media has an increasing reputation as an environment for the discussion of global tragedy as well as a place to vent our frustrations with whichever corporation has treated us badly this week, many of your customers log in for some light relief from their day-to-day grind, actively seeking some comedic content. Be sure to provide for these opportunists by sharing funny content, provided your brand hopes to be personable.

And from now on don’t break the golden rule: definitely don’t use “lol”. “Lol” is over.