If you’re not using emojis for your online flirting, you may be missing out on some potential love connections. When it comes to sending that first message, it turns out whether or not you use an emoji as well as which one you choose can have a real effect on your chance at a reply.
To gain some insight on emoji usage in online flirting, dating app Clover algorithmically examined 90 million messages from 3 million of their users to see if emojis impacted the response rates on the first contact between two users. They found that 10 percent of conversations start with a message that contains an emoji.
“Considering 82 percent of our users are aged 18 to 34, we were pretty surprised to learn that only 10 percent of opening messages contained emojis,” Clover CEO Isaac Raichyk said in a release.
But that’s good news: it turns out that women reply 5 percent more often to an opening message that contains an emoji. It’s true for men as well, who reply 8 percent more often when an emoji is included in the first message.
What makes this study even more useful is that it also goes as far as to break down exactly which emojis are getting responses and which are not. The following infographic shows the 12 emojis men and women (24 total) are most likely to respond to. It also gives some insight into which emojis you should definitely not send in your first message.
