Popular dating site match.com wanted to avoid alienation of its audience during the Valentine’s Day period. Emily Andrews explores its work with Brands2Life on the #mentallydating project

Who: match.com and Brands2Life

Problem: One of the world’s most popular online dating agencies, match.com, recognised Valentine’s Day as a celebration that can exclude singletons, and thus match.com’s members and potential members. The dating site sought to change this and to simultaneously promote its Twitter handle, @match_UK, with a social media campaign tailored solely toward single people on Valentine’s Day. “Valentine’s Day is often seen as a time for couples, but we wanted to give daters something to smile about and discuss too,” says Alex Permain, MD, digital & social media at Brands2Life.

Brands2Life, an integrated communications agency working alongside match.com, aimed to harness social media’s potential to engage consumers with a campaign generated from an extensive social media audit.

“Social media provides match.com with an opportunity to facilitate and reflect daters’ conversations about the roller coaster of their dating lives,” says Permain. Jeremy Corenbloom, marketing director at match.com UK & Ireland, adds, “We decided to carry out both PR and social media activities which were designed to complement each other and communicate the ‘364 better days to go on a date message.’ Social media is where the majority of conversation around dating takes places so we wanted to create an activity which would generate discussion about dating at this time.”

Strategy: Through the analysis of over 600,000 conversations around online dating, match.com coined ‘mentally dating,’ a concept that was already popular on social media, particularly among female audiences. The resulting campaign encouraged single women to spend Valentine’s Day with the celebrities and people they were mentally dating – their fantasy dates – leaving the year’s other 364 days free for new dating experiences.

The research also showed that fan fiction had a large online following. match.com integrated this insight into its campaign by identifying three up-and-coming authors who then created online stories for select Twitter followers based on who they were mentally dating. In the two weeks running up to Valentine’s Day, 11 followers received personal story instalments. 

Corenbloom says, “Creating a campaign which focused on our followers and the people they were mentally dating helped us to personalise our approach and create interesting shareable content. This meant that our followers could spend Valentine’s Day reading their own personal fan fiction story leaving them with 364 other days to meet potential dates.”

The #mentallydating hashtag became synonymous with the campaign as users, authors and the @match_ UK Twitter handle used the hashtag to share stories. The fictional tweets were then posted to Storify.com, an online story platform, thus creating a clear and concise record of ongoing stories that were available for people to read retrospectively. Permain says, “Twitter’s shortform nature is its strength. But perversely, it was also a limiting factor for this campaign when we wanted to allow the passive observer to easily read the daters’ #mentallydating stories. Storify allowed us to pull these together into a single narrative, without fundamentally altering the original nature of the activity.”

The nature of social media allowed single people to stay home on Valentine’s Day, avoiding all the coupleorientated activities going on outside, while remaining connected with other single people, and using a platform that was rooted in the idea that every other day of the year can be for single people.

Results: The @match_UK Twitter handle used the medium of social media to create personal connections with individuals that would increase consumer engagement, while developing match.com’s brand persona. match.com focused on single people at a time that can otherwise sideline them, positioning the online dating site as a champion of fun, romance and dating. 

#mentallydating received 407 mentions, 196 @ replies, 57 regular tweets and a reach of 1.8m, placing it in a powerful position against competitors who were equally vying for social media traffic during the Valentine’s Day period. Permain says, “Datainformed social media campaigns invariably succeed, as you’ve had the world’s best focus group validate the behavioural insights before one even hits send on the first tweet. #mentallydating tapped into a fundamental truth we can all relate to: our mental dating lives are some of the most colourful tales never told.”

The campaign received positive feedback from @ match_UK followers at a time of year that could be otherwise unpleasant for match.com’s target audience. In response to a tweet from @match_UK saying, “How’s your Valentine’s Day going?” One user replied, “It’s been all the more lovely thanks to the #mentallydating stories loved it thank you”.