Online Trends & Analyses

Forget Tinder, Facebook is the New Matchmaker

  • Author

    Irma Jakić

  • Published

    May, 13, 2019

  • Reading time

    3 min

From April 30 to May 2, Facebook held its annual F8 developer conference. CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a couple of new features that Facebook is about to launch soon.

Redesigning Messenger

The social media’s giant main focus is on redesigning both the web and mobile design of their apps. Besides switching to a more basic design and losing its recognizable blue color, some of the major announcements include redesigning Messenger app. It should now focus on connecting you to friends you interact most with (for example, you will be able to watch videos together at the same time).

New changes on Instagram

Also, Facebook’s social network Instagram is losing its likes count, meaning the number of likes under users’ posts will no longer be seen.

Overall, the goal of all changes is to reconnect with users. After several privacy issues which caused distrust among users, the conference’s ”the future is private’‘ moto is a clever move by Zuckerberg.

Launching Secret Crush 

But, what got people talking the most is something that probably none of us saw coming. Facebook is launching a dating app. Yes, you read it right. A dating app.

Officially called Secret Crush, Facebook’s new feature will let you pick out friends you have a crush on without them knowing (hence the name). You’ll be able to see the events they’re attending, groups they’ve joined in, etc. Basically, Facebook is now officially helping you stalk your crush. But, to fulfill its motto of “connecting people” – if your crush also puts you on their Secret Crush list, Facebook will alert you both that you’re eachother’s secret crush. (Where was this when we were in high school?)

As always, opinions on the new feature are divided. While some like the idea of Facebook trying to reconnect with its users by adopting new, useful and free features…

…others are critical of the idea, calling it Facebook’s desperate attempt to stay relevant in the era of online dating apps.

And some people just want to see the world burn. They are evoking the dating feature on other apps, like… Slack.

As Facebook’s biggest redesign in five years, it is understandable that new features caused a bit of a fuss. Especially the Secret Crush feature which is something never before seen on Facebook.

Media Analytics for Marketers Ebook

Analysis

After scrolling through some Twitter posts, we wanted to get a better overview of people’s opinions on the app. We used Determ to find out what has been said about “Facebook dating” on the Internet over the last 30 days.

Facebook dating was mentioned over 10 000 times and reached 65,580,968 impressions in the past 30 days.  Determ’s analysis also shows that the Secret Crush feature was mostly talked about on web, Twitter and Youtube.

 Overall sentiment ratio also shows interesting results.

43.3% of all mentions of Facebook dating are positive, 34,5% negative and 22.1% neutral.

People talked about the Facebook F8 conference the most on Twitter. It reached over 30 million impressions worldwide, mostly in the United States, as shown in the map below.

Mentions of the conference reached the peek on April 30 and May 2 when it was held. But, as the time goes the number of online mentions is falling, as we can see from the graph below.

However, since the app is currently available in only 14 countries, it will be interesting to see how will Secret Crush be accepted by all 2.37 billion active Facebook users once it’s implemented in every country.

Okay, we will not leave you hanging like this. If you’re curious about how will the Internet react once Facebook’s dating feature becomes available in every country (or if you want to know how the Internet feels about anything else), head over to determ.com/blog and get the answers for free.

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