The Hinge dating app, founded in 2012 and available in over 20 countries, is a one of the fastest growing dating apps for singles looking for a serious relationship. Hinge has built a variety of features and has branded their app to help singles connect in person, claiming the app was designed to be deleted, with the goal of eventually finding a long-term relationship. This Hinge Dating App Review Guide is designed to provide you a complete Hinge Overview and will help you determine if the Hinge dating app is a platform that would be right for you.
Hinge By The Numbers
With over 1.21 million active users on the platform, and 36% of that user base being female, the Hinge App is considered a fast growing dating app that currently holds stronger ratios to women to men, in comparison to Tinder and OkCupid.
Creating a profile on Hinge
Hinge's profile creation process is similar to other dating apps such as Tinder, Bumble, OkCupid, etc. You have to upload photos, utilize profile prompts, and display physical, educational, and occupational information. With 36% of total users on Hinge being female, it is recommended to take advantage of every profile feature to stick out from the competition.
Hinge Profile Photos and Best Practices
Hinge allows users to upload 6 photos to their profile. Your photos are critical for finding matches on the Hinge dating app. The Hinge app allows for a pre-written prompt to be applied to each photo, giving your potential matches a topic to comment on when viewing your profile. Your profile should include a variety of photos that showcases your most attractive qualities. Since potential matches have the ability to directly like and comment on your individual photos, this is your opportunity to catch their attention while using prompts to give your future matches an easy ice-breaker to spark unique conversations.
Connecting Hinge with Instagram: Hinge allows users to connect their dating app profile to their Instagram accounts and to have their latest feed displayed within their Hinge profile. If you have a great looking Instagram feed that contains a variety of high quality photos, demonstrating your attractive qualities, then connecting your Instagram account can help support your profile and provide potential matches the ability to see additional photos and receive a better idea of what dating you might look like.
Hinge data scientists conducted a test of 1,000 member profile photos to determine what photo criteria resulted in the most likes on the platform. Reported by Hingegirl.com, the following results will help you follow best practices that have been proven to result in more likes on the Hinge dating app.
Hinge Photos Best Practices
Hinge Profile Prompts: Instead of a traditional profile bio, the Hinge app allows users to apply up to 3 prompts to their dating app profile. Hinge users can write responses to pre-written Hinge prompt topics that will be displayed in conjunction to their profile photos. These prompts allow users to provide information about themselves in an interesting way. Potential matches have the ability to both like and comment on your profile prompts. You should utilize these prompts to provide interesting information about what you enjoy in life and to demonstrate your sense of humor. Keep your responses on these prompts positive, light, and highlight your exciting experiences or interests.
Hinge Profile Virtues, Vitals, and Vices: Hinge allows users to provide personal demographic, physical, educational, occupational, political, and other information that will be displayed on their dating profiles. Hinge breaks up this personal information into three categories; My Virtues, My Vitals, My Vices.
My Virtues: Allows users to include their Employer's name, job title, school attended, education level, religious beliefs, hometown, and political beliefs.
My Vitals: Allows users to include their name, gender, age, height current location, ethnicity, whether they have children, and their future family plans.
My Vices: Allows users to include their participation and frequency for drinking, smoking, whether they use marijuana, and drug usage.
Hinge Filter Preferences and Dealbreakers Overview
The Hinge app allows their users to set preferences and filter potential matches based on a variety of attributes. Hinge breaks their filter capabilities into three categories: Basic Preferences, Member Preferences, and Preferred Preferences.
Basic Hinge Preferences: Hinge allows users to set the gender they are interested in matching with and the desired location where they would like to search for potential matches.
Setting Desired Location: Hinge allows members to set their desired location for free. This is similar to the premium Passport feature
Free Hinge Member Preferences: In this section, Hinge allows you to set an age range of your desired matches. The majority of users on the Hinge Dating App are within their 20's and early 30's, so you can expect matches in your area within these age groups. Hinge also allows you to set the maximum distance from your set location that you would like to see matches. Depending on whether you live in a highly populated area, and your willingness to travel further to meet dates, you might want to increase your desired distance to have access to more potential matches. In addition to age and location range, you also have the ability to set your desired ethnicity and religion of matches.
Hinge Dealbreakers: Hinge allows you to set deal breakers on each of your filters and Hinge Preferred Member preferences. By making any of these filters set to a deal breaker, Hinge will limit your potential matches based on these settings. This can be very helpful when targeting potential matches that meet your desired criteria and type.
Hinge Preferred Member Settings: Hinge allows users that pay to be preferred members to have additional filters to when viewing potential matches. Hinge Preferred Members have the ability to further filter and set deal breakers on height, whether their matches have children, their family plans and goals to have kids, their educational level, how they lean politically, and their stance on drinking, smoking marijuana, and drugs.
Matching and Messaging with Women on Hinge
Liking Profiles on Hinge
The Hinge Dating Apps differs from other apps like Tinder and Bumble by not having the ability to swipe on profiles, but instead having the ability to like photos and profile prompts. Hinge's approach differs from common swiping apps by encouraging fewer and more meaningful connections on their app that result in an-person or virtual date. They encourage this by having users provide a handful of Hinge profile photos and writing answers to prompts that potential matches can review, like, and comment on.
Commenting on Profile Prompts on Hinge
Each Hinge profile can use up to 3 prompts. Hinge users can write answers to these prompts giving viewers the opportunity to learn something new about them prior to or after matching. Hinge provides the ability to comment on prompts to better improve the chance of sparking up a conversation with a new match. When you comment on a user's profile, that potential match has the ability to like your comment and invite you into a conversation, or can directly reply to your comment resulting in a conversation placed in your message queue. We have written a great article on how to start conversations on Hinge and provide tips on how to keep your Hinge messages engaging. Read here to learn how to master messaging on Hinge.
Commenting on Profile Pictures on Hinge
The Hinge app allows users to upload up to 6 photos to their profile. Hinge also allows for pre-written prompts to be applied to each photo. These pre-written prompts make it easier to provide ice-breakers to spark up conversations with potential matches. Within the Hinge dating app, users have the ability to directly comment on photos to initiate conversations prior to matching. This differs tremendously from Bumble and Tinder which require that a match is made before a message can be sent; this gives users an additional opportunity to catch the attention of potential matches and to initiate conversations. To learn more about how to improve your Hinge messaging and how to increase the amount of dates you receive from Hinge, please see our article on How To Start Hinge Conversations.
Hinge Most Compatible
Hinge automatically provides recommended matches with their Most Compatible feature. While using the Hinge dating app, the app will keep track of your preferences over time based on the profiles you like and the potential matches that send you likes. Their algorithms then attempt to pair you with others that you would send a like to, and vice versa. This feature can result in better connections with potential matches on Hinge as well as serve as a tool to better connect with matches that would result in a great first date.
Hinge Boost and When To Use It
The Hinge dating app has made their Boost feature available, allowing users to make their profile visible to more people for a limited amount of time. Similar to boost features made available on Tinder and Bumble, Hinge Boost will result in your profile being shown to more potential matches for a set period of time. Hinge's boost period differs from Hinge and Tinder's by a significant amount of time. Hinge allows users to boost their profiles for 8 hours with each boost that is initiated. This is significantly longer than the more popular dating apps. The cost of 1 boost is $14.99, but similar to other dating apps, Hinge allows users to purchase multiple boosts at once resulting in a lower per boost cost.
When to use Hinge Boost:
While there hasn't been any data released by Hinge that discloses the most successful days and times to utilize the boost feature to receive more likes, we have conducted our own analysis ,using popular boost times on other dating platforms such as Tinder and Bumble, and have found similar results on Hinge. Generally speaking, a winning strategy when it comes to using boost features is to activate your boosts during peak times where dating apps are being used by the most amount of users. Thursdays from 7pm-9pm local time and Sundays from 7PM - 10pm are the peak times for most popular dating apps. Reviewing our clients' results as well as our own accounts, we have determined this is also true for Hinge. With the Hinge boost lasting 8 hours, we recommend starting your boost in the middle of the day on Thursdays and Sundays so that the boost ends when most users drop off of the app. This means starting your boost at 4pm on Thursdays and 5pm on Sundays.
Hinge Phone and Video Chat Features for Virtual Dating
Although the COVID-19 pandemic has changed many things about our daily lives, one thing it has shown is that people always want to make new connections, no matter the circumstance. To conquer the need to feel connected while being physically apart, Hinge has introduced a new suite of features, branded Date From Home. After sending your new match a message, users can decide whether they're ready to have a video call outside of the app, and once your match agrees, Hinge will let you know that they are ready for a virtual date.
Fifty years ago, a global pandemic would have hindered singles from finding their perfect match; but in 2020, that is not the case. At the beginning of lock down in March, Hinge surveyed users about video dating, finding that 70% of users were open to the idea. Two months into the pandemic, 64% of users have had a virtual date during the pandemic, with over a third saying that they have been on a video date in the past week.
Even before the pandemic, relationships started virtually. Why not take the plunge and ask for a video chat?
Hinge Free Version vs Hinge Preferred Member Benefits
Preferred Member Features
Additional filters for height, if someone has or wants children, politics, drinking, smoking, marijuana, and other drug use.
Unlimited number of likes to use.
Option to see everyone who likes you at the same time in one organized view.
Subscriptions automatically renew unless auto-renew is turned off at least twenty-four hours before the end of you current pay period.
Free Membership Features
Users are exposed to the same curated community of relationship seekers as those with a preferred membership.
10 likes each day
Filter for gender, location, age, ethnicity, and religion.
Complete profile creation and access to pre-written prompts.
Should you pay?
The answer to whether you should pay completely depends on how quickly you want to meet local women on Hinge and how detailed you would like your search to be. The free Hinge app features allow up to 10 likes per day, limiting the amount of matches you might receive in the short term. If you want to hit the ground running and have access to more profiles while being able to filter deeply on potential matches, then becoming a Hinge preferred member is right for you. We recommend that you have an amazing profile setup prior to upgrading to a preferred membership.
We have created a complete guide to helping create a top 10% dating profile filled with examples that you can copy/paste to your profile today. Whether you are creating a Hinge profile, or are on multiple dating apps such as Tinder, Bumble, Match, or OkCupid, you can utilize our profile creation guide to create an amazing profile to start improving your results today. Click here to download your guide.
Using Hinge as a Testing Ground For Other Dating Apps
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The Hinge dating app provides users different prompts to help you generate your profile. These prompts provide a great opportunity to discover what content is most attractive to potential matches, and what can be applied and used on your other dating apps. Potential matches will like individual prompts and/or photos, giving you instant feedback on what is working with your profile. If you are using multiple dating apps/platforms, we recommend replicating success when it's applicable. When you receive likes on the Hinge app from individual prompts, photos, or receive great responses to specific openers, we recommend using that feedback to help further improve your other dating profiles by applying those same photos and prompts within your photos and bio sections of those apps.
How To Instantly Succeed on Hinge
As evidenced by our Hinge Overview, the Hinge Dating App can be an amazing platform to meet high quality local singles if you're looking for a more serious relationship. Succeeding quickly on Hinge requires an amazing dating profile, combined with engaging conversations with matches. Creating an attractive profile, constantly sending likes and comments, and keeping every conversation engaging can easily turn into a part-time job. The good news is ParagonDating is here to completely manage this process for you. We deploy a team of dating experts to your Hinge profile (and your other dating apps) to create an attractive top 10% profile, curate matches based on your preferences, manage and take the wheel on all of your dating apps, and arrange dates for you. If you would like to kick back and receive dates with high quality singles as early as this weekend, click the Get Started Link below and schedule a free no-stress consultation with our dating experts to determine if ParagonDating is right for you.