Tinder’s Right Swipe to Social Media Influencers

Tinder’s Right Swipe to Social Media Influencers


Tinder is the world’s most popular mobile dating apps. Since its debut in 2012, Tinder has made meeting new people easier than ever before whether you are looking for a relationship or dating casually. Tinder has generated over 30 billion matches in over 190+ countries. Users swipe more than 2 billion times a day and over 1 million dates are set each week. The numbers speak for the popularity of Tinder among the masses. Tinder utilized influencer marketing into its overall marketing strategy to promote its brand among new audiences and attract new users. In this article, we will look into Tinder’s collaboration with social media influencers to promote the launch of the app’s Reaction feature in the fall of 2017.


The Campaign


Tinder announced the release of the “Reactions” feature in October 2017. Reactions are an array of animations available to the users for conversations on Tinder. Some of the animations include “throwing a martini” image and “ball’s in your court” among others. Coinciding with the release of the Reactions was Tinder’s Menprovment initiative, a funny video series starring Tinder employees. This video series focuses on women’s encounters with overly forthcoming men on the app. The Reactions are emphasized as a way to help deal with such inappropriate encounters.


Collaborating with Social Media Influencers


In the Menprovement initiative, a total of six videos were posted on Tinder’s official YouTube and Facebook accounts. These videos were accompanied by six Menprovement graphics on Instagram, all of them promoting Tinder Reactions. Look at the following video:

In the above video, famous American comedian Whitney Cummings stars in the role of the “douchebag expert” helping the employees at Tinder develop an ideal man. She shared the video on her Instagram account where it was seen by almost half a million followers.


Tinder also collaborated with six other social media influencers on Instagram in addition to Whitney Cummings as a part of promoting the Menprovement Initiative. All of the accounts were those of meme creators and five of the six influencers had more than 100K followers.


List of influencers involved:


  • @bitc.h
  • @mytherapistsays
  • @shitheadsteve
  • @tank.sinatra
  • @friendofbae
  • @chuckleandlaugh


A total of 39 sponsored posts were shared by these six social media influencers in partnership with Tinder which included Menprovement Initiative related content created by Tinder (about one-third of the sponsored posts) and their own original meme centred around Tinder (majority) of the posts). All the posts explicitly included Tinder’s brand name and most of them used the branded hashtag #menprovement. The campaign garnered over a million likes and 21K comments across all the sponsored posts.


Here are a few examples from the campaign:


This post by @tank.sinatra uses a scene from the famous movie National Treasure and highlights the lengths to which Tinder users go to impress each other. With over 44K likes and 1200+. This post was the best performing post out of the four posts created by this social media influencer.


The social media Influencer @shitheadsteve published 16 sponsored posts on Instagram. The best performing post from this account accumulated close to 40K likes and over 1.5K comments. True to his style, the meme is hilarious while also builds awareness about Tinder.


@friendofbae created eight sponsored posts in partnership with Tinder. The best performing post created by the meme account amassed over 8500 likes and close to 200 comments. The social media influencer creates meme around various topics and themes. In this post, he takes a line from the popular TV show The Office and uses it in Tinder’s context, clearly showcasing the name of Tinder in the post.


This campaign is a good example of collaborating with social media influencer to build brand awareness while addressing a common issue faced by a demographic on the platform. What also stands out in the campaign in the humorous and light-hearted tone of the posts. Like many apps, Tinder also opted for influencer marketing and reaped amazing benefits through flawless execution.