After look­ing at race and reli­gion, the online dat­ing site OkCu­pid turns its sta­tis­ti­cal eye toward the actual con­tent of the mes­sages sent between participants.

It’s worth not­ing that the aver­age response/reply rate is 32%.

First up, what to say in a first mes­sage:

  1. Be lit­er­ate. Net­s­peak, bad gram­mar, and bad spelling are huge turn-offs. The worst six words to use in a first mes­sage: ur, r, u, ya, cant and hit. Casual laugh­ing is OK, how­ever: haha, lol and, to a lesser extent, hehe appear to increase the response rate.
  2. Avoid phys­i­cal com­pli­ments. Sexy, beau­ti­ful, hot and cutie give reply rates from 5–14% less than the aver­age. An exam­ple to show this is in how the word pretty is used: as an adjec­tive it results in a response rate 2–7% less than the aver­age, while if it’s used as an adverb it results in an above aver­age rate of response.
  3. Use an unusual greet­ing. Hi, hey, hello and holla all pro­duced well below aver­age replies. Yo, hola, howdy, what’s up and how’s it going fared much bet­ter. In fact, not even using a salu­ta­tion was bet­ter than say­ing hi.
  4. Don’t try to take it out­side. Attempt­ing to move the con­ver­sa­tion away from the rel­a­tive anonymity of the site in a first mes­sage decreased the chances of a response (e.g. by pro­vid­ing phone num­bers, email addresses, etc.).
  5. Bring up spe­cific inter­ests. Men­tion­ing a spe­cific pas­sion of yours—anything from lit­er­a­ture to video games, zom­bies to vegetarianism—increased the chances of receiv­ing a reply. An espe­cially good thing to do (obvi­ously) is to men­tion one or more of the other person’s inter­ests (i.e. read their pro­file and men­tion some­thing from it).
  6. If you’re a guy, be self-effacing. Exud­ing con­fi­dence in ini­tial mes­sages didn’t seem to improve response rates. Instead, hum­ble­ness was what worked best. Although “be care­ful not to let the appear­ance of vul­ner­a­bil­ity become the appear­ance of sweaty des­per­a­tion: please is on the neg­a­tive list (22% reply rate), and in fact it is the only word that is actu­ally worse for you than its net­s­peak equiv­a­lent (pls, 23%)!”
  7. Con­sider becom­ing an athe­ist. Men­tion­ing reli­gion improved response rates in almost all cases (apart from when one uses the generic term god), but men­tion­ing you’re an athe­ist was the best of all; it cor­re­lated with a 10% increase in responses.

Almost 16% of first mes­sages are over 2000 char­ac­ters (roughly 400 words) with the aver­age lying around 740 char­ac­ters. But what was the opti­mum mes­sage length?

Now, our [data clearly show] that in raw terms, it helps guys to write longer mes­sages. But when we fac­tor in the actual time it takes to com­pose a given mes­sage, it becomes clear that in terms of time put in vs. like­li­hood of start­ing actu­ally hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion, shorter is actu­ally better.

[…] the ideal first mes­sage length is 200 char­ac­ters, or 1 minute’s worth of typ­ing for the aver­age writer.

If you’re the kind of per­son who spends a lit­tle more time read­ing a pro­file and think­ing about your mes­sage, say, 10 min­utes, then the opti­mal length goes up a few words (to 270 char­ac­ters), but, still, short is better.

Incred­i­bly enough, the opti­mal first out­reach from a woman to a man is just 50 char­ac­ters long!

After read­ing these posts I’ve become some­what enam­oured with OkCu­pid and now want to join just so that I can get my very own flow­chart to my heart. Prob­a­bly best to run this past my girl­friend first, though.