It’s
everywhere. Social Media has invaded our lives and has impacted (positively and
negatively) how we interact. Weddings are not left out. Social media can be
used effectively in pulling a successful day. Here a few ways you can make use
of social media for your wedding.
- Inspiration: Congrats! You are getting married. However, you are lost for inspiration. Not to worry. Pinterest is a great place to start off. Pinterest is a pinboard-style photo sharing website that allows users to create and manage theme-based image collections. It offers streams of images. You can follow wedding boards and/or pinners with interest in weddings. You can even create your own boards and have your wedding related ideas, crafts and activities in one place. To make it more fun, I suggest you create separate boards for several wedding elements such as dresses, hairdos, shoes, jewelry and accessories, honeymoon spots, food and wine, bridal party etc. Pinterest also offers the opportunity to pin from anywhere on the web with the pin-it button. Blogs are a great place to read wedding related articles. There are thousands of insightful blogs online that talk about all things weddings. Read as many as you can to get a grip on where to start planning, what to incorporate and what not to. One benefit of seeking inspiration from wedding blogs is that wedding blogs are authored by people that cut across different races, customs, cultures, countries, ethnicities. As such, you get to learn about various wedding customs and traditions from distant lands. Stay glued to this blog or browse through previous posts to get started.
- Pre-Event Planning: Use Facebook to stylishly announce your engagement by updating your relationship status. Congratulatory messages would start coming in from friends. Next, create an event and invite friends you want at your wedding. Any friend who doesn’t get an invite may feel left out. You are not bothered? Cordon off the wedding guests from the rest of your friends by restricting invited guests from inviting their friends. This is a sure way to streamline the guest list. Encourage invited guests to post well wishes on the Facebook event page. Furthermore, create a Facebook group (preferably, closed group) for your wedding party members to share wedding planning information. Your girls would bond easily before the day. When people are involved before the big day, it stirs more excitement towards the day. Create a Twitter hash tag and encourage guests to tweet well wishes with it. The hash tag helps to find tweets relating to your wedding easily later. You can use the hash tag to communicate wedding related information to all those who are coming such as driving instructions, local airports, motor parks, bus stops, hotels and must-see sites in the wedding city.
- Vendor Search: After you have a picture in your head of what you want your wedding day to look like, the next thing is consulting with wedding vendors. However, you have no clue about where to get all the wedding vendors you need. At this juncture, wedding planning websites help you by offering local wedding vendor search. The searches are localized you would be amazed to find a wedding photographer living next to you. Check out TheKnot.com for US brides, Sugar!Weddings.com and namywedding.com for Nigeria brides. Furthermore, you are likely to get deals and sweepstakes on Facebook or Google+ business pages than on company’s official websites.
- D Day: Assign a Chief Tweeter or several tweeters to live tweet the event so those who are not present could still be a part. Live blogging provides rolling textual coverage of the event. If Aunt Sally doesn’t make it to the wedding, she can follow the blog posts.
- Photography: Your wedding photos would be a memento. While you concentrate on the wedding taking place, encourage guests and bridal party members to tag and share photos they take with their Smartphones to photo sharing services such as Flickr and Instagram. On Facebook, create a photo album where you can upload all pictures taken by the professional photographer and share with everyone. Tag guests who were present at the wedding. However, the use of these social media services doesn’t replace the services of the Pro; they only add fun to it when you see candid photos taken by amateurs.
- Videography: Ustream allows you to stream your event live for friends and family who couldn’t make it to the event. If you want to prevent any Tom, Dick and Harry from viewing your live stream, it can be password-protected and afterwards you make them private. YouTube is a video hosting service and video sharing website. It comes in handy after the whole event. Short video clips of the salient elements from the day can be uploaded such as the father-daughter dance, cutting of the cake and processional.
Tell
us how you were able to incorporate social media in your wedding.
No comments:
Post a Comment