The First 7 Words: Do They Matter?

[foggy]

Tinder shows message previews. These message previews can be 7-9 words I find.

Now imagine a girl in a big city. She's likely being inundated with dozens, if not hundreds of messages from guys she's matched with on Tinder.

Pretend you're one of those guys. What are the chances she even saw your message preview among the others? And what are the chances she opened it? It's likely she's going to use the message preview to determine whether your message is even worth opening or not.

In digital marketing, we are always striving to increase the click through rate for our ads on social media, search engines, and emails. The click through rate is the ratio of people who click on any given ad to the total number of people who saw the ad. There has been research done that prove certain techniques, when used correctly, increase click through rate. I believe that using these techniques in the first few words of your message can increase the amount of girls who see your message preview and choose to open it.

For example....

- Headlines that contain numbers are more effective than headlines without numbers. (1)

- Headlines that contain odd numbers are more effective than headlines that contain even numbers. (2)

- A colon or hyphen in the headline performed 9% better than headlines without. (3)

- People prefer 0-1 superlatives in the headline. (4)

- "Will make you", "this is why", and "can we guess" were the top headline phrases on Facebook that got the most engagement. (5)

This definitely applies to message previews for texting too...personally, I'm an android user, and the preview consists of about 7-9 words as well. Not sure about iphones. Maybe someone can let me know.

Anyways, these are just a few of the many techniques that increase click through rate. Try some of them out and let me know how they work for you. You could even use them for your subject lines on the forums....hmm.....

Sources

1. https://moz.com/blog/5-data-insights-in ... ders-click
2. https://medium.com/i-data/29-reasons-yo ... f4671327e3
3. http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/20 ... ough-rate/
4. https://moz.com/blog/5-data-insights-in ... ders-click
5. https://medium.com/the-mission/this-new ... 1358f6639a

 

[ProblemSolving]

No, the words don't matter. Improve your pictures or prepare for more of the same results.

It's likely she's going to use the message preview to determine whether your message is even worth opening or not.

No, she will look at your pictures to see if you are worth replying to.

You can come up with all the clever openers in the world which will get you more CONVERSATIONS, but in terms of actual dates and lays, the results will stay the same. Click baiting headlines leads to more girls looking for attention and entertainment, not necessarily the girls that are looking to meet up.

I like your analytical approach, but your focus should be on getting the best pictures possible. The texting is just the fluff needed to go from point A to point B.

 

[lostnumber]

Songbird,

I like where your head is at and appreciate that you brought sources to bear. I don't think message previews mean that much though; the previews are so short that you can't deduce anything important from them anyway. Getting a girl to read your message has more to do with good timing and good pictures than anything else. Its different on an online dating site where you actually can have message TITLE in addition to the main body. I think your thought process would be much more applicable in that scenario.

ProblemSolving is absolutely right that pictures are king and the most important piece of your profile. However, I would argue that messaging skills are much more important than he is making them out to be. I do Tinder game almost exclusively and my results have skyrocketed as I've gotten better at at messaging and setting up dates. My pictures have changed slightly over the course of that time, but I've not gone out and had professional photos done or anything. So what you say DOES matter, but I'd worry more about your overall gameplan and message quality than what words come first.

 

[lostnumber]

Although, having said that, I do think its important to always lead off with a girls name. So I guess that would fit into the "first 7 words" paradigm