Dating apps are being embraced by people all around the world. The influx of users, that various dating apps are experiencing, is majorly led by the worldwide lockdown and quarantine due to coronavirus. People lacking human connection are switching to online dating to try virtual romance.
As the usage of dating apps is skyrocketing, matchmaking services are trying to keep up by providing the best experience of virtual dating. In this new era of dating, the dating routine has somewhat changed. While people would have met in a cafe for their first date, they are now taking extra precautions before meeting in person.
Of course, a person can be a little different than his/her profile picture. It’s hard to identify the overall personality of a person by just looking at a few pictures and chatting with that person. However, due to COVID-19, people are taking longer to meet each other in person than they would otherwise. This imposes a challenge for dating apps to offer the right kind of features and experience in getting to know people better virtually before scheduling a meet.
Latest trends that dating apps are following to enhance matchmaking
The pandemic brought along a major challenge for the survival of dating apps. Questions were raised about how dating apps would survive during the lockdown, as people could not step out, date venues were closed, and quarantining made hookups doubtful. As I checked on google trends and with some Google analytics agency, dating apps are trending within lockdown and people are checking for dating apps.
Little did we know that dating apps would play smart and adapt to the changed situation. Dating app development companies are now finding better solutions to light up a romance through virtual dating. Here are the latest trends in matching people on dating apps:
Gamification
Gamification is a trend that’s followed by almost all types of apps to engage their users. Dating apps are also leveraging this trend to attract the experienced-driven, tech-savvy millennials. Gamification helps dating apps to add intrigue and break through the noise while finding the right match.
The level of interactivity that gamification offers, the social interests of millennials are satisfied.
Many dating apps offer gamification, some of which are:
Curiosity-based – These dating apps enhance matchmaking by offering users new ways of evaluating profiles. For instance, Sapio, which is similar to Tinder, uses a mutual opt-in system to enable chats and other ways to evaluate users. It also raises a general curiosity by prompting users to get to know potential matches and a question and answer format to discover someone’s personality.
Game-based – Some dating apps like Mazel use mini-games to identify potential matches. Users are required to play 4 mini-games to discover bits of information about a person they may be interested in.
Party game – Spin the Bottle dating app uses the famous part game of spinning the bottle which allows users to view a 30-second video of a profile that the bottle stops on.
Quiz-based – Score is a dating app that enables users to take short quizzes to find their match.
Scientific speed dating – A dating app called Scientists for Love uses human senses to help users find perfect matches.
Events & meetups
What’s better than meeting different people through events and meetups on dating apps? One of the latest trends in matching on dating apps has come as an exciting feature. The events & meetups feature sends notifications to users about the ongoing or upcoming events where they can find and meet new people.
Why this feature is an intriguing one is because users can meet other users on the app without having to connect with them or express interest in their profile exclusively.
A dating app called ‘Her’ which focuses on the LGBTQ community offers this feature to its users. Another app named Clover also leverages the meetups feature which it has named Mixers.
The feature organizes group meetups and sends out theme-based meetup ideas to users through notifications. Interested users can respond to the notification and join the meetup when scheduled.
Social media integration
Much like other apps, dating apps are also offering social media integration within the app, to facilitate better matchmaking. While social media integration increases user engagement within the app, it also helps dating apps to collect valuable data about users. For instance, dating apps can collect interesting insights into the user behavior pattern, the likes and dislikes of a user, the preferences of users while searching for a match, etc. These insights enable the apps to offer recommendations and features that ease finding the right matches.
Video-based profile
Very few dating apps offer a video-chatting option to users, which is extremely important during the quarantine. As people are avoiding meeting in-person and going to date venues, it is more difficult to assess the overall personality of a match through text messages and a few images on the profile.
Therefore, many dating apps that don’t have the video-chat feature are introducing a new feature that replaces a profile picture with a 2-seconds video.
The 2-seconds video is more like a boomerang that people can add in place of a still profile picture. This is a refreshing trend followed by dating apps to delight users and help them intrigue other users by displaying a short video in their profile. This feature will definitely help users to get more likes and find matches more quickly as the videos can help users assess the personality of another user.
Advanced search filters
Better matchmaking can be facilitated with better search filters so that users don’t spend much time swiping profiles to search for the best match. With advanced search filters, users can fill in their preferences and find instant matches. Therefore, using advanced search filters is one of the latest trends in matching on dating apps.
This feature is extremely useful for users that may either be interested in a serious relationship or may want a casual fling, make new friends, or socialize with different people. Dating apps offer advanced search filters such as age, gender, religion, location, astrological signs, political views, etc to ease the search process.
This feature caters to the preferences of users while finding the right match and also aids dating apps in better performance and retaining users. I hope you like reading this article.
