Social Media Profile Pictures – How Often Do You Change Yours?

Time for Modern Social Media

Social media is an intricate part of most of our lives. A lot of people check their social media first thing in the morning, if not constant throughout the day.

Whether we’re using it personally, or we’re using it for business, most of us have at least one social media account that we frequent. If you’re a savvy social media user, you might be surprised to find out that people don’t change their profile picture as much as you might think. In fact, the average person only changes their profile picture once every 2 years.

A survey conducted by the company Bidvine found this out. They asked 2,000 British social media users how often they changed their profile pictures. People who used dating applications changed their profile pictures the most frequently, and there were some other interesting results.

If you use the dating apps Tinder or Grindr, the average user changes their profile picture every 2-3 weeks. However, what about people who use dating websites? People who used match.com changed their profile pictures, averagely, every 4 years. People who used Plenty of Fish changed their profile pictures every 3.2 years on average.

But what about other social media? LinkedIn users, the social media meant to build communities of businesses together, changed their profile pictures the least. For these users, they changed their profile pictures about every 2.1 years. Twitter uses don’t typically change their profile pictures often, either. They only change their image about every 1.8 years.

After that, the changing profile pictures becomes more and more frequent. Snapchat users change their image every 8 months. Instagram users will typically change their profile pictures every 6 months. People who use Facebook (which owns Instagram, interestingly) change their profile picture about every 5 months. And WhatsApp users change their’s every 2.5 months.

WHY DO PEOPLE WAIT SO LONG TO CHANGE THEIR PROFILE PICTURE?

The survey didn’t end there. Another question that the people polled were asked was: “If you don’t change a profile photo regularly, why do you think this is?”

What’s your answer?

62% of poll participants said that they didn’t change their image often because they struggled to find images they were happy with. 49% of people admitted that they wanted to look younger on their social media accounts.

When asked, the CEO of Bidvine, Sohrab Jahanbani, said: “Looking at the regularity with which people change their profile photos, it appears that older, more conventional dating websites and the networks people use on a regular professional basis, such as LinkedIn and Twitter lag behind, while younger single people are more likely to want to use newer photos.

“It appears that people don’t change their photos because they struggle to find photos of themselves they like. So with this in mind, Bidvine is setting up a pop-up photo booth offering free professional photography for those who want to update their social media profile pictures. As we all know, whether it’s for a wedding, a company headshot, or your online profiles, professional photos make a difference. We’ll be announcing cities and dates for the photo booths on our website shortly.”

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