One In Five Tinder Users Swiped Right to Learn About the EU Referendum

DigitalTrends

We heard a month ago that David Cameron had met with representatives from Twitter, Google, Buzzfeed, Bite the Ballot and Tinder. At the time there were rumours going around that David Cameron himself would pop up on Tinder to talk about the referendum. That was proven false, but we did hear that Bite the Ballot and Tinder had something in the works that must have popped up only a week later.

Just as Tinder in the US was offering information on the presidential election, Tinder in the UK has been providing information of the EU Referendum, or Brexit as it's also known. Users could swipe right and find out more information from a true or false quiz. Hopefully, this will mean that younger voters are more informed and more willing to go out there and vote.

More than 20% of Tinder's UK users swiped right to find out more information and many of those who didn't respond wouldn't have had the information pop up. This quiz would have appeared between matches and was aimed at users between the ages of 18 and 34. Participation was split pretty closely to the middle with 51% of swipes being from women and 49% being from men. We do not know how these users are going to vote or even how many of them will actually vote, but it shows that a lot of people were interested.

This social media strategy wasn't the first in the UK, but it was very different from the Facebook strategy during the general election the year before. Then, people were only encouraged to share if they'd voted on Facebook and Twitter are doing something similar for the Referendum with emoji, but the Tinder strategy is the one that will have likely helped the most. Tinder might not seem like a likely place for this sort of thing but it's actually rather practical. It catches people's eyes, they can interact with it and they can learn about the topic. Tinder caught a lot of people's attention and that's what Bite the Ballot were hoping for.

Tinder are still going to just be seen as a hook-up app and probably will for a long time, but it's interesting to see what they'll do to be seen as more.

Rosina Brooker

Rosina is a Songbird writer with a degree in Creative Writing. She's trying to focus on her novel on the side but is glad to be playing around with apps and writing about them in the mean time! Follow her @Songbird_Rosina

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