How to Set Up a Facebook Dating Profile Step by Step

Before you start, turn on Location Services for Facebook. Dating uses your location to suggest people based on your distance preferences. Then open the Facebook app, tap Menu, then Dating, then Get started. Answer each question and tap Next, or tap Skip to pass on it. When you reach "Ready to review the details?", tap Confirm below it, then tap Next, and your Dating profile is created.

Here is the whole setup, start to finish.

1. Turn on Location Services for Facebook in your phone's settings.
2. Open the Facebook app and tap Menu.
3. Tap Dating.
4. Tap Get started.
5. Answer each question, tapping Next to move on or Skip to pass on one.
6. When you see "Ready to review the details?", tap Confirm below it.
7. Tap Next to finish.

The mechanics take a few minutes. What you put into step 5 is what decides whether any of it was worth doing.

Facebook says to turn on Location Services before you create your profile. Dating uses your location to suggest matches based on your distance preferences. Skip it and Dating has nothing to measure distance from.

Think about distance the way you would think about any first date. A woman forty minutes away is a woman you will struggle to see twice in one week. Suggestions close to where you live, or close to where you spend your evenings, turn into dates far more easily, because a drink on a Tuesday is a short trip for both of you.

Setup lets you tap Skip instead of answering, and it is tempting to tap through everything and get to the photos of women.

Resist that. A half-empty profile gives a woman nothing to react to. She sees your face, maybe likes it, and then has no way to start a conversation and no sense of who you are. Men who skip everything tend to wonder later why their likes go nowhere.

Answer the questions that let you say something specific about your life. Skip only the ones where you honestly have nothing to add.

Your first photo decides whether she looks at anything else. Make it a clear, recent shot of your face, in good light, where you look relaxed and like yourself on a good day.

After that, add a few that show how you actually live. You with friends. You doing the thing you do on a Saturday. Somewhere you actually go. Each one should answer a question she might have about what an evening with you would be like.

Leave out the gym mirror selfie, the photo with sunglasses covering half your face, and the group shot where she has to work out which one is you. A photo she has to decode is a photo she scrolls past.

The best answers are specific, short, and a little bit fun. They give her a picture and an easy opening.

Compare two versions of the same idea:

• "I like travel, food and going out." Every man writes this, and she cannot reply to it.
• "Still recovering from a week of eating my way around Mexico City. Ask me where the best tacos were." That gives her a picture of your life and a question she can use as her first message.

Keep each answer to a line or two. Short, punchy lines read well on a phone, and a wall of text rarely gets read to the end. Leave out anything negative, like a list of what you do not want in a woman. A profile that opens with demands tells her more about your bad experiences than about you.

The "Ready to review the details?" screen is your last chance to catch mistakes before anyone sees them. Use it.

Read everything as if you were a woman seeing it for the first time. Look for typos, answers that sound flat, and anything out of date. Check that your strongest photo of your face is in there. Then tap Confirm and Next.

Treat the first version of your profile as a draft, not a finished product.

Give it a week. If women are liking you back and conversations are starting, leave it alone and focus on your messages. If very little is happening, change one thing at a time: a stronger first photo first, then sharper answers. That way you learn what actually made the difference.

When a conversation does start, keep your messages short and light, and move toward a drink within a few exchanges. A good profile gets you conversations. A plan is what gets you the date.