Can Data Science Craft the Perfect Tinder Bio?

Online dating has never been so popular. An estimated 40% of Americans have at one point in time turned to Tinder and other online dating apps. I confess, I'm one of them. Everyone who has ever been on these apps knows that one of the most intimidating aspects of starting the journey of online dating is creating your profile.

How do you represent yourself to potentially millions of men and women? How do you stand out in a sea of other profiles? What kinds of things should you include? After all, your bio is essentially your dating CV! We don't blame you for stressing about it. Luckily, we're here to help you craft your profile, with tips backed up by data.

With apps like Tinder, photos are clearly a major aspect of your profile, but an often neglected aspect is the Tinder bio. A recent university study found Tinder profiles with bios had a 4-fold increase in the number of matches received as compared to profiles with no text. I decided to take a look at what both men and women were putting in their profiles and what we can learn from them.

Let's Get Swiping

To get started I created 2 generic male and female Tinder profiles which served as my search engines into the Tinderverse. Using tinderjs and matching all genders and orientations, I was able to scrape over 5000 profiles within Sydney, Australia. To get a good representation of both genders, I chose an equal distribution of male and female profiles to analyse. Here's a snapshot of the types of profiles collected:

Nothing too surprising here, the majority of the people I found via Tinder are in the Sydney metropolitan area and within the 20's - 30's age bracket, though it is interesting seeing a spike of profiles in the 50's-60's age range.

Searching for the Quintessentially "Tinder" Profile

The aim of this analysis was to divine out any patterns from all the Tinder profiles out there and work out how we can apply this information when writing our own.

A quick text analysis of the scraped profiles shows some interesting observations. Clearly there are a lot of common values that the Tinderverse shares. You're not going to make many enemies if you have an Instagram account, love travelling and hanging out with your friends (maybe for a coffee or a chat).

There are still some stark gender differences here though:

Clearly, women are far more into their pets and going on adventures than guys are - or at least they like to say it more. Men, on the other hand, like to talk about going on dates, having a good chat, and otherwise being social. We can hazard a guess that women are describing their ideal partner - someone who likes going on adventures and can tell a funny joke - and possibly that tattoos are kind of a deal-breaker! On the other hand, men tend to describe what they want to do on a date - chat, go for coffee and taking it easy (or that they're easy, this ones a bit confusing). So here's some advice: to craft a better Tinder profile, consider avoiding these over-used terms. Perhaps the two genders could learn from one another - mix it up! Men out there should try talking about their ideal partner, and women should introduce some fun date ideas.

How about length?

The sheer number of choice people have on Tinder means attention spans are dwindling. 23% of Tinder profiles had no words in their bio and over 60% of profiles contained 30 words or less. Whatever you have to say, you probably should be saying it succinctly. But don't forget the earlier stat - people with text in their bios had four times the number of matches. You definitely want to be saying something!

Emojis are 🔥

One way of conveying information about yourself concisely is through emojis and a lot of people seem to agree. Over 44% of profiles contained emojis, of which, an average of 4 emojis were used per profile. Here are some of the most popular ones:

Emoji usage is wide and varied, but a common theme appears to be substituting words with their emoji counterpart rather than conveying reactions or emotions. Travel, dogs, drinks and coffee are common crutches for most people, as we saw earlier. So think outside the box! Your profile might end up being a confusing mess of indecipherable emojis (upside down face anyone?) but hey, at least you'll stand out.

Writing Your Bio

When it comes to online dating, everyone has a different approach. Whether you want to stand out or just seem like a normal person, there is no silver bullet that will work for everyone. However, your Tinder profile doesn't exist in a vacuum. How it appears to the people you're trying to attract is informed by the all the other profiles they see. Being aware of what everyone else is saying should inform how you want to present yourself, as well as avoid the dating profile equivalent of awkwardly talking about the weather. The data definitely tells us there are some established cliches that you'll want to avoid. In an app that encourages users to be picky, you'll likely attract more attention by avoiding the stereotypes.

The top takeaways we can give you are:

• Be concise - users are used to reading short profiles
• Avoid talking about interests that everyone likes (I'm looking at you, travel!)
• Avoid generic date talk - everyone likes going for a coffee and having a chat! What do you like?
• Use emojis! But maybe some of the less popular ones.

Check out more Data Stories, or see the original Displayr document here!