photo credit: We Heart Photography
My husband and I recently attended a friend’s engagement party, and the events that took place during the celebration confirmed for us that we live in the age of what I call, The Hashtag Wedding. Having said that, let me describe to you what happened when we popped open the bottle of champagne, filled all the guests’ glasses and toasted to her soon-to-begin wedding journey:
As the glasses clinked, friends reached for their mobile phones and started snapping pics of the newly engaged couple while shouting things like “hashtag #engaged!,” “hashtag #weddingbling!” and “hashtag #itsofficial!”
In that moment they reminded us of how social media allowed us to plan our own Nigerian-American-Jewish wedding in Mexico and about just how much the modern wedding is influenced, planned and experienced via social media. What was even more intriguing than the fun people at the event was the use of social media and how it supported our beliefs about modern weddings and the newly engaged of the Millennial generation.
My engaged friend and I are both in our 30’s and both part of the Millennial generation. And while some critics say social media can negatively affect how couples plan their nuptials, there’s no denying that social wedding planning isn’t going away anytime soon. Here’s why?:
It also takes advantage the ways in which we use technology and social media in our everyday lives, including planning our weddings.
As a generation, we are using social media to plan our weddings for these reasons:
1. We are wired:
Everything we do on a daily basis involves our tech gadgets. Think about this: 53% of millennials would rather give up their sense of smell than their laptop or phone. If you were planning your wedding and lost your cell phone, would you be able to find your guest list in a physical address book? If you’re my age or younger, the answer is probably no. You would however be able to check online to see if you saved a copy somewhere.
2. Our wedding guests are also wired:
It’s not just you who’s planning a wedding using social media, your guests are also planning to attend your wedding using social media.Why?Because social media is part of our everyday lives and helps us make plans and stay organized. If your guests already use it everyday, they might as well use it to help them get to the wedding on time.
3. We are super busy:
From bloggers to full time parents and everything in between, we are all very busy. Would it surprise you if I told you that most of my friends job titles can no longer be explained using one or two words like nurse, teacher or office assistant?The modern job title looks something like this:SEO-driven blogger on a mission to make copywriting fun and useful.You get the point! When we’re this busy, we need effective, easy to learn and use online tools to help us in our everyday lives. It’s especially the case when we’re planning the biggest party we’ll ever throw. Well, at least that’s true for most of us.
4. We are multicultural and international:
I’m from Nigeria, my husband is from California and between the two of us we had a wedding that incorporated so many cultures and traditions. We’ve also lived around the world, and had a wedding that included family traveling from across the globe to celebrate with us. And the thing is, we’re not alone. This means using forms of communication that help us stay in touch with our Indian grandma living in Nepal and our socially awkward yet favorite 1st cousin living in Australia.
In 2013, 1 in 5 Millenial weddings were interracial. When you’re bringing together family from all over the world, we would expect you to care more about getting them to your wedding than about getting your wedding color palette right. Right? (Please say yes.) This means using forms of communication that help us stay in our friends and family living halfway around the world. If our wedding guests are going to travel thousands of miles to come to your wedding, then we believe they deserve to have a blast while they’re at it. And, they deserve to be able to continue communicating with you in the same ways you already use to keep in touch with each other, which is social media.
5. We are already using social media to plan our weddings:
We’re not just using social media to plan our weddings, we’re actually using tools provided by social media platforms (Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter) to plan our weddings.
Need more reasons to start using wedOcracy to plan your big day? We built it so we could have all the things we love about the different social media platforms (social networking, collaboration, social sharing, etc) in one place. We call it social wedding planning! Nobody gets social wedding planning like we do, because we use it ourselves (and didn’t get married 20 years ago).
What are your thoughts about planning weddings using social media? We’d love to hear about it in the comments!