Zoosk Review: A Social Online Dating Service
Published on October 26, 2010
Zoosk is a rapidly growing online dating service that has gained a lot of popularity over the last few years. I hadn’t even realized how popular it had become: as I was preparing to write this article I stumbled upon the fact that Zoosk now has 2 million fans on Facebook. While I’m sure not all of them are still using the service, it still is an indicator of how much Zoosk has grown and how popular it has become.
Signing-up And Your Online Dating Profile
The sign-up process at Zoosk is pretty straightforward. Because I feel there are more interesting features of the service to cover here, I’m going to keep my discussion on creating your profile pretty brief. One quick note: on Zoosk they refer to your dating profile as your “Date Card” but I’ll continue to refer to it as your profile in this article.
As you would expect, there are some straightforward areas of your profile to fill out. The three main sections are Story, Perfect Match and Ideal Date. The Story is where you will do most of your talking about yourself, Perfect Match is where you’ll be talking about the person you’d like to date, and Ideal Date is just what you think it would be: describe the date you’d like to go on. The other main areas of your profile are books, music, movies, testimonials and icebreakers.
One other thing I want to mention about the profile in general: you can’t message without a photo. If you just want to check the site out and look at some profiles, you need not have a photo. As soon as you decide that you want to begin participating on Zoosk you’ll need to upload a photo of yourself. I really like this idea and have seen more and more online dating services begin to move in this direction. Honestly, if you want to date online and if you want to meet other singles at some point they’re going to have to see who you are. Better sooner than later in my mind.
Testimonials
One of the big unique things about your profile at Zoosk is that you can have friends create testimonials for you. This is an opportunity for you to have your friends talk about what they like about you or what makes you who you are. Many of us have difficulty talking about ourselves so this is a great feature. This is also the first indication of how “social” Zoosk is. As I’ll discussed later, Zoosk goes out of their way to keep you connected with your friends (or dates) through many different ways.
Icebreakers
Icebreakers are questions that you place in your dating profile that other singles can answer. This gives the people looking at your profile and easy way to start a conversation with you if they’re interested in you. These are a step up from a wink, where the wink is just a sign they are interested with no message attached. My advice on this is that since icebreakers exist I would avoid winks altogether and simply use the icebreakers. I think the odds of someone responding to a wink are much less than the odds of someone responding to an icebreaker where the way you answer the question could grab their interest.
The Many Social Aspects of Zoosk
Zoosk has many of the features that you would expect from any online dating service. Where Zoosk begins to take things in a new direction is with all the online social interaction and social linking that it offers. Most areas of this dating service offer ways to connect with other people and not just those you are hoping to date. Zoosk is one of the most socially interactive online dating services that I’ve looked at.
Facebook App
Zoosk has a Facebook app, although honestly having this as a feature of your online dating service is becoming much more common these days. Still, this feature allows people to do things such as flirting with other singles who are not even using Zoosk yet. These people can then sign up at Zoosk and keep the conversation going. You can also use your Facebook account to log in.
Mobile App
Again, this feature is becoming very common among the many online dating services. Many online dating services limit their mobile application to things such as receiving information on new matches. Zoosk takes this further and appears to aim to offer most of their functionality from their website in their mobile app as well.
Zoosk Friends and Messenger
Keeping things social, Zoosk offers you the ability to find friends and then offers tools such as their Messenger to help you keep in touch with them. From my point of view, I wouldn’t see using my online dating service as a way of keeping up with friends (that is what Facebook is for). That being said, it is still a nice feature to offer and if you do happen to make friends using the service keeping in touch with them is simplified.
Connecting Your Other Online Services
Zoosk allows you to connect several of your other online services with your dating account. You can login with your Facebook account, connect your Netflix queue to the movies section of your profile and also allows you to connect the music service Last.fm to the music section of your profile. Again, Zoosk is going out of their way to keep your profile connected to the other parts of your social life online.
Status Updates (Sort of)
In addition to all of this, Zoosk also has a feature where when you are on your homepage you see updates from singles in your area. This feature has a very Twitter-like feel to it, although there is no official status updates in the service. Instead, when you update your profile a message will be placed on other singles’ homepage that shows that you’ve made an update, what type of update it was, and gives a preview of your update. This can get your profile more attention as it is promoted to the front page and it likely has the effect of encouraging people to go out of their way to keep their profile up-to-date. I really like this feature because if you’re not getting much contact you may be able to simply update your profile to get some more eyes on it.
Zoosk Coins
Another feature of Zoosk is the usage of “coins”. These coins are a virtual currency that you can either buy or earn through particular tasks (such as getting a friend to create a profile at Zoosk). These coins can then be used to do things like helping promote your profile so that more people will see it or sending other singles virtual gifts. The topic of Zoosk coins has quite a few details to it and for the sake of keeping this article at a reasonable length I have already discussed the details on Zoosk coins in a separate article. If you’re not interested in reading that article just know that the Zoosk coins are entirely optional and you need not use them to use the dating service.
Communicating with Other Singles
Zoosk is not free and to communicate with other singles you will need to subscribe to the service if you want to start some conversations. At one time, the Zoosk coins (which can be earned for free through certain tasks) could be used to communicate with other singles. However, that has changed now and to take advantage of any of the features that allow you to communicate you will need to subscribe. For more details on this read my article on Zoosk pricing.
Final Thoughts on Zoosk
Overall I find Zoosk to be a very friendly online dating service and I expect that it would be most popular with people in Generation X and Generation Y. That’s not to say that older generations would dislike the service but it becomes clear that the service has aimed itself towards people who are extremely connected on the Internet. While different people of all generations can be very connected online, I do expect that the people who will find this service most inviting are in the younger generations.
It appears that Zoosk has gone out of their way to be more than just an online dating service and intends become a part of the online social circle of its users. For those who fall into this category I suspect that Zoosk would be a great choice as an online dating service.
Author: Brad
Brad initially struggled with online dating but over time became quite successful using it. He met his wife using online dating and has been giving advice and helping people improve their results since 2007. He has written a Free Online Dating Guide to help others find success with online dating. You can learn more about his personal experience using online dating and running this website here.
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