Everyone knows that a great profile photo does more to attract people on dating sites than anything else. Lately I’ve been working with Datingheadshots to offer their VIP photo shoot and photo review service to dating sites. I always scratch my head when dating sites don’t take up the offer to help their members make the most out of dating sites. I hear a lot of excuses but I simply don’t see the downside to offering users help on the photo department.
OkCupid certianly knows how important profile photos are, and to that end has launched MyBestFace.
OKCupid members visit MyBestFace, upload some photos, analyze pairs of other people then get a detailed report & discover their best photo. The app asks you to select a few keywords to help the system analyze other users’ reports.
You have to rate 60 people’s photos in terms of which of the two you would date in order to receive your report. This is smart, drives engagement, it’s fun and I got more and more excited as the countdown neared zero. After rating 60 photos, you’re in what’s called Charity mode.
True to OKCupid’s geek roots, the statistics page displays a boatload of metrics.
Votes are tallied based on various user demographics such as artists, Christians, deviants, divas, stoners, vegetarians and so on. If you seek a specific type of person, pay attention to how the closest demographic voted on your photos.
OKCupid did a great job with the feature, I’m totally sold on it. Sites like Plentyoffish have had profile/photo rating forums for years, but OKCupid takes things much farther, albeit achieving the same objective. One thing I would like to be able to do is to click on a photo I am rating to see the person’s profile. You can, however, view the profile of people who have rated your photos. I’m a big fan of peeping people’s photos on Facebook, and MyBestFace is like browsing photos on crack. Click, vote, click, vote and on and on.
Being able to see the geographic location and profiles of the people who voted on my photos is a nice touch. turns out I’m big in Europe.
I see a lot of Myspace duck-face style photos on dating profiles. Perhaps MyBestFace will show people that these style of photographs aren’t as hot as you think, especially when you’re holding the camera up to the bathroom mirror.
OKCupid has also embedded the Facebook Like button at the bottom of the page. Now that I’ve “Liked” MyBestFace, it shows up on my wall and my 27,437 friends are all going to run over to OKCupid to join, at least that’s what OKCupid would like to happen. There is also a re-tweet and several other social sharing buttons as well.
The Facebook Like button is a game-changer for driving viral traffic to external sites. Expect to see lots of sites using this feature. Liking specific personal ads can’t be far behind. Zoosk has been doing something similar for a while now.
It was fun to rate a few ex’s on OKCupid, I’m glad the rating is anonymous.
When I was patiently waiting for my report to become available I was greeted with, “For now, sit back and wait for the awesomesauce explosion.” There’s that OKCupid personality shining through.
I just noticed that they provided me with a link to share my photo review results with friends.
The whole process was fun, the report was easy to decipher, and I’ll be making the recommended changed to my OKCupid profile photos.
