How to Make Dating Apps More Social
This article is brought to you by Stream’s Content Partnership with Global Dating Insights. Stream helps apps like Feeld, Paired, and Wink build best-in-class Chat and Activity Feed experiences to help spark meaningful conversations.
A common theme across online dating platforms is that they often evolve into something greater than simply a tool for matching. Dating platforms are increasingly becoming hubs of social activity.
To help foster healthy and vibrant communities on these platforms, Stream explores the three key ingredients that are required.
1. Community
Singles want to get out on dates, but that journey doesn’t have to be linear. As well as encouraging romantic connection, online dating platforms can help address issues of social isolation and loneliness.
Platforms are increasingly looking to create alternative ways for individuals to connect over common interests and find like-minded people. Activity feeds are one way that Stream can help dating apps deliver this feature to their users.
Stream helps platforms provide a notification and activity feed similar to social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. This includes interactivity options for users including reactions, comments, and personalised feeds (based on insights from machine learning algorithms).
Ultimately, this allows for users to receive real time updates so they can keep up and interact with the community around them.
When it comes to the app developers, Stream enables these teams behind-the-scenes to adopt the activity feed feature within days. They do so by harnessing their API and software development toolkits.
This makes the process faster for developers as they don’t have to rely on building the product in-house. Instead they can rapidly adopt ready-made infrastructure that allows for scalability and performance.
The ability for users to chat with one another is the bread and butter of online dating. But just because it’s foundational, doesn’t mean it has to be basic. There are a variety of ways to flesh out messaging features to make them more convenient for users and the app developers.
A good example of this is Stream’s social messaging services. They enable users to add creativity and uniqueness to messages with in-built support for emojis, gifs and URL links with automatic previews.
Additionally, users don’t have to worry about typos, as they can have the ability to edit and delete messages when needed. And for dating apps that revolve around group-dating or open relationships, Stream also enables direct & group chat options.
Developers looking to adopt these functions can receive Stream support regardless of whether they use React, React Native, Flutter, Android or iOS frameworks.This flexibility also extends to Stream’s APIs being compatible with applications in any language.
When it comes to user-interface, Stream can provide production-ready software development kits so that adding a chat function can be done fast and with scalability.
3. Content
While these features allow for more convenient communication between users, content moderation is needed to reduce toxic and negative experiences. Stream has a range of tools to help app developers keep fostering healthy user communication.
These include the ability to moderate image content, reduce spam, and flag profanity. For users found to be behaving badly, Stream can also provide the tools for dating apps to ban and mute them accordingly.
In addition to this, Stream’s AI tools are capable of analysing a user’s interactions to identify their intent. This means that moderation systems can be trained to detect potential scammers and other bad actors.
In addition to unmoderated content, another key aspect of trust and safety is cybersecurity protections. Stream’s chat solutions are certified to be GDPR and SOC 2 compliant, meaning one less thing to worry about for developers.
Conclusion
Putting singles together in a digital social space is not enough to drive connection and discover compatibility. Providing them with the tools to meet, chat, and discover like-minded individuals in a healthy community space will take the user experience to the next level.
For app developers looking to harness these tools, Stream has Startup, Standard, Premium, and Enterprise packages to suit dating platforms of varying sizes. To start a free trial with Stream, follow this link.
For more details, feel free to send your questions to: Jessica Nelson, Senior Director, Pipeline and Sales Development at Stream – @ jessica.nelson@getstream.io. You can also connect with Jessica at Global Dating Insights’ conference in New York on the 29th and 30th of March 2023.
