Can Your Social Media Popularity Help Your Love Life?

Are you addicted to Facebook, Twitter, and FourSquare, constantly looking to gain more followers and become a bigger presence? Are you commenting and connecting online more often than in person? If so, you might want to check out Matchmaking service Tawkify.

Tawkify is trying something different than the standard online dating sites. Instead of relying on profiles or photos, the service matches subscribers with similar Klout scores.

Klout is a web-based service that ranks you between 0-100 in your social media presence - the higher the number, the more influence you have over the Web.

According to their press release, Tawkify's creators found that people with similar Klout scores seem to have more in common and are more likely to be attracted to each other.

To use Tawkify, members fill out a brief questionnaire and submit a photo (no algorithms necessary). After a brief phone interview, applicants have to be accepted and then interviewed over the phone prior to any matching. Tawkify creators then personally match members - based on age, similar interests, and most importantly, similar Klout scores. Sixty people who were matched initially had one phone exchange with their respective matches to see if there was any romantic interest. Tawkify found that after the phone exchange, 90% of the sixty members were interested in talking again or meeting in person. Incidentally, none of the members were told that they would be matched according to Klout scores.

Tawkify is the brain child of Elle Magazine advice columnist E. Jean Carroll and former Microsoft product planner Kenneth Shaw. Carroll speaks with almost every male applicant to screen them for their intentions - namely that they aren't only using Tawkify for sexual hook-ups.

The price tag isn't cheap: Tawkify costs $15 a match, $30 for three matches and $99 for six matches so only the serious need apply.

Other dating services are tapping in to people's social media presence, including a site called Hitch.me, which pulls information from your LinkedIn profiles to match you with others in your industry or professional circles. The goal is to match people based on "real" information (since most people use LinkedIn for professional reasons), rather than relying on people to be honest in their traditional online dating profiles. Using LinkedIn adds some credibility to who they market themselves to be.

AreYouInterested.com is also utilizing social media to match singles - specifically Facebook users. Instead of manually scrolling through friends of friends to see if there's anyone you might fancy, AreYouInterested does the work for you and lets you know who is single and available in your circles and what their interests are.

I'm sure other sites will be popping up over the next few months to help singles take advantage of their social media presence. We're connecting online in all sorts of ways, so it only makes sense that romance can happen thanks to our Twitter followers as well as joining Match.com or bumping into a stranger at the coffee shop.