It’s important to use a flattering (but not misleading) picture of yourself in your profile, and starting with a clear, well-composed, smiling image is your best bet. Make sure that your leading pic is a solo shot without other people in it – you don’t want potential matches to fall in love with your best friend.
Helpfully, Tinder has a “smart photo” function which continually tests the success rate of the photos you’ve uploaded to your profile, and automatically shows your best-performing photo to other users first. It’s well worth enabling this function as it doesn’t cost anything extra, and Tinder claims that it boosts right swipes by 12 percent.
Photo Diversity
Ideally, you want to take advantage of all the photo slots Tinder offers you to provide as much information as possible to potential matches. Consider that your pictures give away crucial information not just bicupid about what you look like, but also how you like to spend your time, matches are going to form a certain impression of you depending on whether you’re squatting in the gym, splayed out on a beach with friends or chugging back beer at the game.
Don’t partake in kittenfishing – the lite version of catfishing – by uploading misleadingly flattering photos, and make sure your images are recent enough to show what you look like now. Remember, there’s no point in being dishonest. It’s all going to come out in the wash when you meet a match IRL, so be upfront from the start. If you’re really having trouble selecting photos, you could consider linking your profile to your Instagram account.
Your bio is optional, but we highly recommended including one. You’re allowed up to 500 words to showcase your dazzling personality here, but we’d suggest you err on the side of relative brevity as online daters don’t want to read a novel while they’re swiping. Make your bio about you, and keep it short, simple and friendly – it’s a bonus if it’s funny, but you don’t want to come across as trying too hard, either.
3. How to Use Tinder
Depending on how much money you’re willing to spend, Tinder has several useful options to maximize your chance of getting matches. The Boost function can help for accumulating matches as it pushes you to the front of the match line for people in your area for half an hour. After the Boost session is over, you will see stats on how much more exposure your profile got (4x, 8x, etc), to ensure you got your money’s worth. Of course, you have to pay for the privilege, and free users cannot dictate where in the queue their profiles appear.
One potential pitfall of Tinder is that swiping becomes so reflexive that it is easy to accidentally swipe left on someone because you’re going too fast. In those cases, Tinder’s Rewind function is invaluable – hand over a few bucks, and you can recover the person of your dreams that you accidentally swiped left on (free users will simply need to slow down and pay attention to what they’re doing).
If you’re willing to pay for Tinder’s subscription services, Tinder Plus or Tinder Gold, you can unlock the Passport function, which allows you to swipe in different cities and countries. So, for example, you could be in London but visiting New York in a week’s time, and Passport will let you start swiping on New York-based profiles from across the pond.
However, even if you’re not willing to pay to use Tinder, there are some swiping strategies that are available to you. One is to use the Super Like function, which tells a user you really like them, bringing you to the front of their queue (free users get one Super Like per day). Another is to bear in mind that those who’ve already swiped right on you are likely to show up near the beginning of your queue, so it’s worth paying careful attention to profiles that appear early in your swiping session. That being said, constantly right-swiping to game the system is a bad idea as it just means you’ll match with those you may not be interested in. Swipe right only on people you genuinely hope to match with, so that when you see that coveted, “Congratulations! It’s a match!” alert, it actually means something.
