Valentine’s Day may come and go, but Match.com spends the other 364 days making sure that next year’s is a memorable one for its customers. The 15-year old dating site has matched up countless couples online through its website, but it has only recently embraced Facebook as a way to reach out to an even broader audience.
Over the last several months, StepChange has partnered with Match.com to develop its Facebook presence with four unique apps. Each app was custom-designed to provide a unique experience that complements Match.com’s core mission: to help singles find relationships that bring them happiness.
Success @Match
Success @Match is a custom tab on Match.com’s main Facebook page, where couples who met on Match.com can share their success story with the world. It mirrors a core component of Match.com that harnesses the goodwill of happy couples who met through Match.com and turns them into evangelists for the brand.
Clicking the “Share Your Success Story” link takes the user to the Success @Match section of Match.com, where they can submit their success story. When the success story is approved on Match.com, it also appears on the Success @Match Facebook tab. From there, Match.com fans can share the story via wall post or message. They can also “like” the story and post a congratulatory comment, which can also be shared.
Are They Feelin’ It?
Developed for Match.com’s premium offering, Chemistry.com, the Are They Feelin’ It? app is designed to give users a taste of what makes Chemistry.com unique from other online dating sites. With its Personality Test and Profile and various online activities, Chemistry.com not only helps its users find what they’re looking for, it also helps them recognize matches who are looking for them.
The app shows the user photos of 10 different men and women and asks whether each appears interested, not interested or is sending mixed signals. At the end of the quiz, the app gives the user their score and explains what the correct answers were for each photo and why, according to Chemistry.com’s Chief Scientific Advisor, Dr. Helen Fisher, a PhD biological anthropologist and Research Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Rutgers University.
Sneak Peek
Sneak Peek is exactly what it sounds like: a glimpse of singles on Match.com who fit a fan’s criteria for gender, age and location. If the fan wants to narrow down the results by other criteria, such as body type, ethnicity or faith, they are redirected to Match.com and offered a free trial.
What’s really unique about Sneak Peek is that it uses Match.com’s own API to find results in Match.com’s database and import them into the Facebook app. It doesn’t run Match.com inside of a tab, and it doesn’t just replicate the functionality of Match.com among Facebook users who have installed the app.
Matchmaker
Our latest Match.com Facebook app is Matchmaker, which expands Match.com’s traditional offerings by allowing singles’ friends to play matchmaker. By bringing Match.com into a user’s social circle, the app has the potential to encourage someone who was indifferent or even skeptical of online dating to give Match.com a chance.
Like Sneak Peek, Matchmaker leverages the Match.com API to pull results from its user database, according to some very general criteria (gender, location, ethnicity and age). The user can then send up to five results to their selected friend, which sends them a Matchmaker request to view the results, as well as an offer for a free trial of Match.com.
Matchmaker, like the other Match.com tabs and apps, was created from the ground up to create a custom fit for Match.com. None of these are “_____ in a box” features, because a one-size-fits-all approach for such a unique service would not be able to immerse fans in a meaningful brand experience.
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