January 28, 2016
Quote #1: Walt Disney – the way to get started is to stop talking and start doing.
Cuplin is a small matchmaking service start-up. The company was born out of work I’d been doing in building Twitter followings for brands; and one in particular, a well-known multi-national online-dating service. Aside from news of the day and celebrity content on Twitter one of the biggest topics is personal relationships. Everything from what someone’s boyfriend did, through to experiences on Tinder and all the way onto tips and tricks for the dating game itself. Of the 500 million tweets sent each day, about 100 million fall into this category… or about 1,000 tweets per second.
Quote #2: Christina Lous Lange – technology is a useful servant and a dangerous master.
If you are a large brand, or even a small struggling start-up, this represents a very large audience you can potentially engage with. This is of course easier said than done. However, there is one common thing most tweeters need to achieve… they want to sound smart and say what they need within the confines of 140 characters. This is where well known quotes and phrases become a useful commodity with which to trade and/or communicate with.
Quote #3: Will Self – quotes are all alike, unless they are great.
With the aforementioned online-dating service, we quickly found that pithy, positive, romantic quotes received the greatest engagement (re-tweets, likes etc), one of my favorites was:
Quote #4: John Lennon – love is all, love is new, love is all, love is you.
It was the re-tweeting of quotes like this that became interesting to us and led us to the idea of a matchmaking service. The insight we found was that people often send their single friends quotes like this as a way to cheer them up. Some digital positive vibes if you will to demonstrate their support. To articulate to the single friend that a positive relationship is just around the corner, even if a little (more) effort needs to be made.
Quote #5: Will Rogers – even if you’re on the right track you’ll get run over if you just sit there.
As we developed our proposition for the start-up we knew that building an audience on Twitter would be key to building our business. We launched our Twitter handle first… before our site, before our business plan and really (if we’re truthful) before we really understood what our business was going to be. Riffing off the insight friends helps singles, we started with quotes that could be used as pick-up lines. A quick search on Twitter with the #pickupline and you’ll see these get very dirty and wildly inappropriate very quickly. We felt that there was a ‘gap in the market’ for clean #openinglines to be shared.
Quote #6: Jane Austen – it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
The clean and positive approach meant that in a short period of time we gained a solid following with some consistent re-tweets and likes. Music, films and literature have also become rich sources for us, particularly when you apply a lens of opening lines… the first line of a song, of a movie etc etc. The added benefit here is for example if you quote a Marvin Gaye song, people who like to re-tweet Marvin Gaye songs (yet are nothing to do with matchmaking) see you and engage broadening your audience.
Quote #7: Marvin Gaye – mother, mother there’s too many of you crying, brother, brother there’s far too many of you dying.
We’ve also had some fun taking old quotes and giving them a modern, social media spin.
Quote #8: Moby Dick – tweet me @Ishmael.
Proverbs and anonymous quotes occasionally gain some traction, but they have to be really really good and not cliché in any way. We believe this is due to people wanting to borrow some of the credibility from the person who originally made the quote. A good Churchill quote for example says what you need to convey, but the fact it was said by Churchill originally gives the tone in which you wish it to be conveyed. Proverbs and anonymous quotes simply lack this extra dimension. That said…
Quote #9: Swedish Proverb – Love me when I least deserve it, because that’s when I really need it.
Finally, we have then started to use the audience we’ve built (now over 7k followers) to communicate to them the service we’ve developed. This has to be a slow process and we’ve had to resist the temptation to shout about what we believe is the next revolution in online-dating. Our followers, after all, followed us for our curation of great quotes, not for us to just sell them something.
Quote #10: Oscar Wilde – success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result.
Matthew Morgan, founder of matchmaking app, Cuplin and @GoCuplin on Twitter, a study of great opening lines.