Aside from being a popular dating site, OkCupid is home to one of the best data blogs on the internet. Put bluntly, OkCupid meticulously explains how to get laid using information from their users. And thankfully for you, their most recent infographic is no different.
To celebrate the new year, OkCupid released a trove of data explaining what they learned from their users in 2015. The most interesting piece of data? The correlation between emojis and likelihood of responses to your messages.
According to OKCupid, the most used emojis are:
However, while they may be the most used emojis, none of these emojis are likely to get a response. The emojis that have the highest reply rate are:
It’s worth noting that while the most used emojis are happy and positive, the ones with the most responses are overwhelmingly negative or sad.
While it may be easy to dismiss something as silly as the correlation between emojis and the likelihood of landing a date, these data points are actually consistent with past OkCupid trends.
In January, OkCupid’s founder Christian Rudder wrote a post explaining the biggest myths of a user’s profile picture. One of the myths that Rudder disproved was that smiling in your profile picture is more likely to land you a date. According to Rudder, “men’s photos are most effective when they look away from the camera and don’t smile.”
And the same is true for women.
“For women, a smile isn’t strictly better: she actually gets the most messages by flirting directly into the camera.”
While we’ve always been told to look happy in photos, for online dating that’s just not the best advice. Even when it comes to emojis.
I’ll be honest… this is hilarious and I’m laughing as I type. The takeaway here? To not only be moody in your photos if you want more dates, but to also use moody emojis. Using sad emojis will increase your chance of getting in the sack with someone. Never in a million years would I have thought I’d write that sentence, but here I am, pushing my professional envelope. So there’s that.
Next week on The Hustle we’ll be explaining if you should end your text messages with “..” or “.” or “…” or without any “.”.
Stay tuned.