The Ultimate Social Media Guide For Wedding Planning

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To make your wedding the social event everyone will be talking about, you need to get social media involved. The first step is using a social media guide for wedding planning to plan your fairy tale wedding.

Believe it or not, you can handle quite a bit of your planning just by making the most of the social platforms you use all the time.

Plus, your friends and family can easily help out, even if they live far off. Get social and make planning even easier.

Decide What To Make Public

Before you start doing anything, decide what wedding plans you'll make public and what to keep private. The last thing you want is for social media to ruin special surprise moments, such as everyone seeing your wedding dress for the first time.

While you might love getting feedback on different styles of cake or place settings, save a few things until the wedding day. The best way to do this is by creating a private board on Pinterest or creating a separate private account on Twitter.

Use Multiple Platforms

No great guide to using social media for wedding planning is complete without telling you to use multiple platforms. Even if you're only using Facebook or Instagram right now, you'll want to explore multiple social networks.

You'll find a much larger variety of content to help you plan your perfect wedding. Pinterest and Instagram are the two best platforms for getting inspiration.

Plus, if you mix it up on different networks, it's harder for the people who follow you to know exactly what to expect on your big day.

Facebook and Twitter are ideal for keeping up with vendors, venues, your wedding planner (or finding a wedding planner) and more. Think of them as the platforms you'll use to stay in contact with service providers. You'll use the more visual platforms, Instagram and Pinterest, for gathering ideas.

Discover The Best Wedding Hashtags

Once you're searching for wedding planning information, what hashtags or search terms should you use? Who should you follow for inspiration? This alone can seem overwhelming, but don't worry.

Social Buddy provides a great list of wedding hashtags for everything from wedding inspiration to wedding planning. While their list focuses on getting content noticed, use these hashtags to search for planning content yourself. Try out some of the hashtags to see which ones give you the best results.

Hashtags are great, but sometimes, it's easier to just follow some of the top wedding influencers in the industry. Luckily, several sites have already gathered together influencers for you so you don't have to search.

Use these lists to find the top wedding influencers:

Don't forget to ask your married or engaged friends who they're following or what hashtags they're searching for. Also, narrow down your sources so you don't get so overwhelmed. There's no shortage of wedding content on social media. After all, Pinterest is where many women already have a wedding planning board long before meeting their spouse.

Aggregate Social Wedding Content

A social media guide for wedding planning typically covers which networks to use and what hashtags to follow, but doesn't tell you how to keep all that content in one place. Yes, you don't have to keep jumping from network to network.

As you're planning, create a private planning website that only you and certain people can access. Then, use a social media aggregator to gather your feeds into one place.

All you have to do is enter a little code and your feed starts showing up on your wedding planning website. If you already have a public wedding site, create a private page to view all the posts coming in that you want to follow.

Alternately, you could also create a feed that's just content from specific users. Or, create multiple aggregated feeds for different topics, such as foods, dresses, flowers, music and so on. Curator.io lets you create a custom aggregated feed quickly and is only 13 lines of code to enter, making it perfect to better gather your content.

Recruit A Few Volunteers

Wedding planning quickly becomes chaotic if you try to do it all on your own. Ask a few friends and relatives to help you out. For instance, you might ask your best friend to create a Pinterest board of possible floral arrangements or color themes.

Just give your volunteers some details about what you're looking for. Then, meet with them once a week to share what everyone's found. This makes social media even more social.

Plus, it's always a good idea to get more opinions on what you're looking at. While you may absolutely love a certain flower, it may clash horribly with your theme. Having a few more sets of eyes helps you spot these mistakes before they ruin your big day.

One thing to keep in mind is to swear your volunteers to secrecy. The last thing you want is for them to share details about your dress.

Also, you may consider creating group accounts on social media. Then, everyone shares the same account to gather content and come up with ideas. This makes it a little easier, especially if you live far apart.

Organize Your Wedding Plans

While you're busy liking, sharing and pinning wedding content, you might easily forget one thing - organization. If you have a Pinterest wedding board with 1,000 pins, but no categories, how will find what you're looking for later?

You have to organize your wedding plans. Every social network works a bit differently, so let's take a look at the major four to see how to better organize what you're looking at:

  • Pinterest - Pinterest allows you to create separate boards for your pins. Organize your wedding planning pins into different boards. Even if a board only has three pins, at least they're not getting mixed in with others that don't quite fit. Plus, you can even have secret boards for planning items you don't want others seeing just yet.
  • Twitter - Twitter doesn't have boards, but you don't have to just scroll endlessly through your main feed. Instead, create lists. Each list will only contain the users you choose. Just want floral content? Create a list that only shows tweets from florists.
  • Facebook - Facebook works similarly to Twitter. You can create lists to only show certain users. However, you can also save posts you want to go back to later. Simply click the Save button on a post to do so. Once you've done this, you can organize your saved content into individual collections, similar to Pinterest. No one else can see your collections.
  • Instagram - Since Facebook owns Instagram, the process works similar to Facebook. Instagram allows you to save posts and then add them to collections. Holding the save icon allows you to choose which collection to add it to.

Spending a little time organizing your content from day one will turn you into an expert level social media wedding planner.

Create Custom Social Invitations

There's nothing quite like getting a wedding invitation by snail mail. It's personal and gives the recipient a nice memento. This is especially true if you add a picture or cute saying. However, most people live on social media.

While you might never get an RSVP from your guests by traditional means, they might just reserve a spot at your wedding via Facebook or other social networks. Simply create an event and invite your friends and family. They can check out the details and RSVP directly from social media.

If you want to make the invitation a bit more special, send direct or private messages with your invitation. You can still create an event, but a personal touch stands out more. For instance, Canva allows you to create free wedding invitations and share them directly on social media. You don't even need to be a graphic designer to get started.

Create Your Own Wedding Planning Hashtag

Want to share the wedding planning process? Or maybe you want to make it easy for others to share their wedding planning ideas with you. Either way, create a custom wedding planning hashtag.

No social media guide for wedding planning would be complete without talking about creating your own hashtags. This is the perfect idea for sharing the process with others and for gathering wedding planning ideas.

Remember how you can aggregate social media content in one place? Use your wedding planning hashtag to gather all planning posts together in one place. This is a great way to work together as a team. It's also fun to create a planning wall to look back on while you get ready on your wedding day. You could even let some of those posts show up on your wedding hashtag wall during your reception.

When creating your wedding planning hashtag, create something that's unique to you. Simply using #weddingplanning won't work as that's used on numerous planning and inspiration posts.

Instead, use something that includes the bride and groom's names or their couple name. Add the word "planning" or "plans" and you're all set. Just do a quick search to make sure it's not taken yet.

Start Your Own Wedding Hashtag

Of course, you can't have a wedding planning hashtag without a wedding hashtag. For planning posts you want to show up during your wedding reception, go ahead and tag them with your wedding hashtag.

Much like with creating a planning hashtag, make sure it's custom to you. Use your names, couple name, wedding date, nicknames, interests or anything else to ensure it's a completely unique hashtag for your wedding.

You can go ahead and share your wedding hashtag with friends and family so they know what to use before they ever sit down for the ceremony.

Find Vendors And Planners

A social media guide for wedding planning shouldn't just talk about how to plan the wedding, but also how to get help. You don't do everything on your own. You need vendors and others to help make your big day perfect.

Use social media to check out and hire anyone who will be working to help make your dream wedding a reality. On social media, you can find:

  • Caterers
  • Florists
  • Event planners
  • Musicians and DJs
  • Photographers
  • More...

Use social media to ask for recommendations. Search and check out reviews. Contact them to ask questions and schedule a meeting. Some may even be happy to meet via Skype or another video chat platform.

Follow Vendors And Planner

While you're following influencers and hashtags, don't forget about the most important people - those involved in your wedding. Now that you've found who you'll be working with, follow them on social media.

Not only can you get ideas from the content they post, but you can stay in contact with them. Use their branded hashtag on any posts you want them to see and respond to.

It's also nice to give them a shoutout after your wedding if they did a good job. Use their hashtags or user names to thank them for all they did. This also serves as a glowing recommendation for future brides.

Bring Couples Closer Together

While many couples live close or together, many don't. Use this social media guide for wedding planning to plan your wedding as a couple, even if you live hundreds of miles apart.

No matter what the time difference, you can share wedding planning details and inspiration via social media. Create a private page on Facebook just for the two of you and a few close friends to share wedding planning ideas and advice. This allows you to stay closer as a couple so no one feels like they're doing it all alone.

Whether it's for wedding planning or for your wedding day, see how Curator helps bring your social media content together for memories that'll last a lifetime.

Image: Artistic Films

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