What we can learn from social networking sites

April 9th, 2007

There’s been much debate recently about the shift in the US online dating market. I’ve been following the discussions with interest. It looks like the market is slowing, social networking sites are taking a chunk of the audience and site owners are sniffing the trends and trying to combat the problem. Some sites are going from a free model to a paid model, others are going from a paid model to a free model and there’s some sites popping up that try to bring together social networking and dating to create something that will appeal to both audiences.

I think that if you’re sold on the idea that social networking is stealing your customers you gotta take more than a superficial view at what social networking sites do that dating sites don’t.

I gather that there’s lots of operators out there who went “oh, social networking is free and we’re trying to charge our users money, so no wonder they’re going away”. I think this is a rather simplistic way of looking at what your customers want or need. If you’re free, and Myspace is free, then what is your site giving your users that they can’t already get for free on Myspace? Are they going to have to spend months on your site filtering out the freaks? Time is money.

My experience of large free sites is that there has to be some system in place to seriously filter out matches, otherwise the users end up having to spend far too much time going through profiles of people they would never even dream of dating. If you’re going for the older, more serious crowd, then making the site free would not work in your favour at all. People who are serious about finding a long term relationship are generally willing to pay for the service. If you could guarantee someone that he could find the love of his life on your site and gave him a choice between paying you a $100 for the pleasure or going on Myspace for free, do you think that person would go to Myspace? But there’s a lot more to places like Myspace than just being free. If you’re going for the younger, more casual crowd, it’s not enough to give them a free service. It has to be the right kind of service. There’s a few more things social networking sites offer that a free dating site wouldn’t.

If you want to make your dating site more exclusive, you raise the price, everyone knows that. But is that enough nowadays and is it the right kind of exclusive? I am not sure that it’s enough anymore for people to know that their fellow daters on the site are rich enough to front the bill and keen enough to pay. It’s a start, but obviously people need more than that from their service. There are a lot of people out there who can afford membership to a dating site and are desperate enough to pay. That in itself doesn’t make them right for me.

People look at Friendster and Myspace and see massive sites with millions of random users so the word “exclusive” doesn’t really seem to gel but actually the end-user experience is very cliquey. People group together via their friends and interests and you can actually make it virtually impossible for strangers to contact you. There is a big big difference between meeting someone who’s a friend of a friend of a friend on Myspace and meeting a total stranger on a free dating site. If you are on a dating site, you’re either saying “I want to get a date” (i.e. laid) or you’re saying “I want to find my soulmate”. Either way, it doesn’t always look good to add “but I’m not willing to pay for it” at the end. On social networking sites there’s the extra cool factor and a certain security that you’re not dating someone who’s a total unknown.

Social networking sites have that cool factor that dating sites are missing. There was never any stigma associated with meeting people on Myspace, but how hard was it to get people to warm to dating sites? You can be more casual about the whole process and not so result oriented. It’s perfectly acceptable, for example, to meet people for friendship purposes and strengthen connections with people you already know. When people join a dating site they’re usually in a one-mind track scenario of finding either a serious relationship or sex. I’ve never seen an actual survey or report about this, but I’m pretty sure not that many people make platonic friends on dating sites.
Places like Myspace are a social trend where kids go to hang out with their mates. More often than not, dating is an impulse buy: “I was just hanging out, downloading some tunes and then I found this chick off the band’s friends page and blah blah blah”.

Another piece that’s painfully missing from most online dating sites is that lovely niching you get on social networking sites. You go somewhere like Tribe, you join a group and you already know the people you’re talking to have something in common with you. You can bond.
The majority of dating sites put deal breakers as a first priority but interests further down the list. I think a lot of people want to date people from their own “scene”, especially the younger crowd.

If you want to get your customers back from the social networking sector you have to really get in there and see what your customers want and then work with that. It’s not enough to change the pricing model. You have to really think about the service you’re offering and see how you can improve it.

The way I see it, once you’ve exhausted the early adopter market (made out of the desperate, the “too busy” and the “results oriented” crowd), you’re hitting the people who do have time to socialise in real life and actually enjoy it. You really have to give them a reason to go online for their dates.

I realise that the late adopters are going to be a very different demographic in the UK than in the US, because in the UK, most adults are already online, but unless you’re going to try and sell the concept of the Internet to some backwater hicks as part of your marketing plan, I’m guessing the bottom line is pretty much the same.

Related posts:

1. Social networking Vs dating sites
2. Dating and socialising online – why are they still two separate things?
3. Serious dating sites: marriage sites, matchmaking sites
4. What we can learn from dancing
5. Women rule the net! (In the UK)

Entry Filed under: Industry stuff