I’m back with more love data for you and this time I have what you have been waiting for. Today I will tell you what to say in your first message and how to carry on a conversation in online dating. This data is gleaned from the analysis of 500,000 OkCupid messages. The patterns that came out were as follows:
Women, you can say pretty much anything as long as it’s positive or neutral. You’re highly likely to get a response if you’re the one sending the first message. Guys, on the other hand, will have to customize their strategy. Here are some data-driven, winning strategies.
Literacy Trumps Netspeak: Write grammatically correct sentences. I know it sounds obvious but you won’t believe how many people find this impossible to do.
Contractions like ur, r, u, ya, cant, hit, realy, luv, wat will HURT your chances of getting a reply. So wat r u doin man, realy, ur neva going to hit dat if you keep doing this shit. Notice that “cant” is just missing an apostrophe and it causes on average a reply drop rate of 20%+. So DON’T miss the apostrophe. Repeat after me, “I WON’T miss the apostrophe”. There are some exception to the “no netspeak” rule like “haha” or “lol” probably because they convey laughter. No “hehe” though. That sounds evil.
Stay Away From The Body: Office rules apply here too. In your message do not mention any physical attributes of your person of interest. Pretty sure you can figure out the reason. It’s super creepy.
Notice the graph. The X axis is the average reply rate of 32%. “Cutie” reduces your average to about 27% and holy shit, “sexy” takes it right down to about 17.5%. On the other hand, personality based or in general non-physical compliments can take your average upto almost 40%. You can take it higher if you use some creativity in your compliments. No body parts though!
Greetings!: The first thing that you usually say is some kind of salutations. Make it a little unusual. Once the very first part of your message has hooked someone’s attention, they’re more likely to read it in full and therefore more likely to reply (as long as it’s not creepy or threatening).
Notice the X axis, that’s the frequency of the word usage every 10,000 messages. For example, “hi” is used most frequently - 2312 out of 10,000 times. “Hi” is also the most boring and ignored greeting because on the Y axis is the reply rate again. It ruins your chances the most.
Be Specific: Online dating is a very busy area. People have too many options and they’re in a hurry. Your first message needs to spell out what you bring to the table to engage someone’s interest. Shared interests are a sure-shot way of catching someone’s attention. Mentioning SPECIFIC interests and commonalities between you and her is a great way of improving your reply rate.
Notice all that green!
Self Deprecate: Men, try as much as possible to be non-threatening. Women are used to and sick of men being too full of themselves. So anyone who is self-effacing is almost sure to catch their attention. The numbers bear this out.
If You’re An Atheist, Let Them Know: The OkCupid users that had mentioned they were Atheists on their profile, got a much better response than those who mentioned their religion. Mentioning your atheism in the first message also scored much better as compared to mentioning the name of a god or the word “God” itself. Yes, yes I understand, it’s a personal matter. But if you have already decided you’re an atheist, make sure you mention it in your profile. It also ties in with the previous point of mentioning specific interests. And what could be a bigger shared interest than God or the absence of him? Let this graph show you the way.
So, this is what data tells you to say in your first message. I can’t help but interject with one non-data driven tip. There’s one thing that big data still hasn’t been able to capture - humour. If it could, it would tell you that a funny message trumps pretty much any other standard operating procedure. So try and incorporate some humour in your messages and watch your results skyrocket.
There’s more in the next installment of Big Data For dating. Start swiping and stay tuned.
Piyush Tainguriya
An engineer by education, writer by profession and a stand-up comic by vocation. I'm only half joking though.
January 25, 2018
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