You Had Me At Your Hashtag: Dating Through Social Media

It's not destined to be a classic like "You had me at hello," but "You had me at your hastag" has a certain ring to it, don't you think?

If you answered "yes," you're not alone. I'm not sure what the new black is this season in fashion, but I do know that social media dating is well on its way to becoming the new online dating.

Think of it this way, says Bianca Bosker in the Huffington Post: "traditional online dating sites offer the internet equivalent of a speed dating session," while "social networking sites are the cocktail parties of the web." On a dating site, you're focused on presenting a very specific side of yourself. When you concentrate that hard on meticulously-crafted self-representation, you lose the spontaneity of dating in real life.

On a social media site, your personality has a greater chance to shine. Instead of trying to appeal to someone you think is your ideal match, and feeling pressured to fall in love, a social media site is just about sharing your interests and connecting with like-minded people. It's much more like finding love offline - it all happens when you least expect it.

The options for dating via social media are endless.

Take Ashley, who told HuffPo that she courted her latest love on Twitter.

Or Danielle, who tried to track down a man who caught her eye through a particularly witty and scathing review of a Chinese restaurant on MenuPages.

Or Rayco and Nuria, a Spanish couple who met on Instagram following a sticker giveaway for fans of the app. They continued the conversation on Facebook, then began video chatting using Apple's FaceTime, and now plan to move to Barcelona together.

"Online dating to me is not online dating anymore," says Julie Spira, author of The Perils of Cyber-Dating and a professional online dating coach. "It's social dating and it's a social experience."

The Internet is the second most common way for couples in America to meet, said a 2012 Stanford University study, and social sites are increasingly becoming responsible for making those matches. A paper from Oxford University reported that less than 10% of couples met on social networking sites prior to 2000. Now that number has more than doubled, to 21%.

Of course, there are pros and cons to both approaches. Social media services are free, unlike many online dating sites, and boast millions more members. They also offer a serendipitous, algorithm-free experience that more accurately mimics offline dating. On the other hand, social media sites don't offer the pool of guaranteed-to-be-looking-for-love singles that online dating sites do.

For now, it looks like social media sites may slowly be edging out the competition. "We live a lot of our social lives on Facebook, Twitter and sites like that," says Laurie Davis, the founder of online dating consultancy eFlirt Expert, "so since dating is inherently a part of our social life - it only seems natural to find love that way as well."

To find out more on how the individual Social Networks like Twitter and Facebook are used for dating you can visit our Social Networks Dating category.