HOW TO EFFECTIVELY UTILIZE PINTEREST FOR PLANNING YOUR BIG DAY
Tips for Planning a Wedding With Pinterest
In case you didn’t know:I LOVE PINTEREST! Personally, I use it to determine my next hairstyle, what I’m going to cook for the day and how to decorate my home. Professionally, it is my most used platform for communicating with my clients.
Before Pinterest, most brides would resort to purchasing bundles of national and local bridal magazines. They could only hope that this particular issue would contain the exact color palette that they were looking for or that the vendors listed were in their area. Having to solely rely on doing wedding research this way is not only time consuming but also incredibly expensive. Some high-end magazines may cost up to $16+ per issue.
As I was writing this blog, a national bookseller listed almost 400 different wedding reference titles on their website. Paperback or hardcover wedding references ranged in price between $4 to $65+ each.
Thank goodness for Pinterest! In less than a decade, this visual search engine has been a gamechanger for the wedding industry. The platform has a community of over 200 million monthly users worldwide borrowing and exchanging over 100 billion ideas in topics as diverse as Acrylic Nails to Zucchini Recipes.
So with a seemingly never-ending stream of data at your fingertips, how much information is too much information? When is this powerful tool too powerful to plan a wedding? Never! Follow along as we show you some of our tips for maximizing your “Pinterest Power” for planning a wedding.
DISCLAIMER: This article is written with the intention of using Pinterest as a supporting tool to assist a wedding professional and their clients with planning an event. We are not implying that Pinterest should be used as a replacement for a professional wedding planner/coordinator. The results obtained by a DIY Pinterest wedding vs a professionally planned event will be vastly different. We are also assuming that each reader has a basic familiarity with using Pinterest, already has an account, and can easily create a Board and Pin items.
Determine your major categories
Wedding planning can almost always be divided into the following 10 major categories:
Attire
Ceremony Ideas
Reception Ideas
Flowers & Decor
Photography & Videography
Stationery
Beauty
Parties & Gifts
Travel
Wedding Info
Categories 1-9 are the main groups of expenditures that you should expect to have when planning a wedding. They are also the most visual of your Pins, filled with colorful photographed images. The Wedding Info section will primarily serve as your reference section with lots of text and/or diagrams providing you with valuable information. Each of these groups will have multiple subcategories which we will discuss later.
CREATE YOUR BOARDS PER MAJOR CATEGORY
Create these 10 boards, one for each category. If you are adding these boards to a previously existing Pinterest account alongside personal non-wedding related pins, I recommend rearranging the order in which the boards appear. This is done using the Board Sort Order ‘Drag and Drop’ feature. Your wedding boards can then be grouped together for easy access.
To reorder boards on a mobile device, from your home screen select ‘Boards’and click on the ‘Drag and Drop’ option from the ‘Board Sort Order’ pull-down menu on the right hand side. Press and hold the board that you would like to move, this will activate 4 pop-up icons [Reorder, Edit, Related & Send]—select the ‘Reorder’ icon. The Reorder interface is similar to rearranging songs on an iTunes playlist. You can reorder the boards by sliding the 3 horizontal bars on the right hand side of each board to the desired location of the list order.
Start Pinning, have fun!
Half the fun of Pinterest is the entertaining way that you can lose yourself to mindless pointing and clicking on whatever tickles your fancy. While we will discuss how to better organize your Pins once “things get real,” just start collecting ideas of things that catch your eye. Enjoy the process and begin gathering your thoughts.
For now, pin your ideas into your 10 main categories. Highly visual items like color palettes, wedding dresses, and flowers are great places to start searching. If you haven’t already begun pinning such items, searching for them will help you to not only form your board but also create a wedding style all your own.
As you Pin, keep in mind that any item that contains mostly text and/or diagrams such as “How To..” posts and “Guides” should be temporarily placed in the overall Wedding Info category.
Remember to keep your other main boards highly visual with lots of images showing what you like at a quick glance.
In the next section, I will show you how to create subcategories to better “file” your Pins. You should expect to have lots of different types of Pins in the Wedding Info category for example such as Stationery & Invites, Cakes, Table Settings, etc.
Begin creating your subcategories
Once your main categories are in place, begin thinking about what your subcategories will be. For example, there are many subcategories for the reception category. Images of items like cakes, custom dancefloors, DJ booth set-ups, signature drinks, potential venue photos, and dinner menu cards may all be great Pins deserving of their own subcategories.
HOW DO YOU CREATE A SUBCATEGORY ON AN EXISTING BOARD?
Select the [Main Category] board that you wish to add your subcategories to— we are using the Reception Ideas board for this example. Click on ‘+Add section’ and create a section name such as ‘Signature Drinks’ and select ‘Next’. Once the new section is created, you can then select the Pin that you would like to place into its own section by clicking on the ‘Edit’ icon, selecting the Section from the menu and entering ‘Done’. Please keep in mind that if you delete the Section [subcategory] it will also permanently delete all pins within that Section that you have moved from the Main Category.
Consider your collaborators
Once you begin forming the aesthetics for your wedding, start considering who you’d like to collaborate with when making final design decisions. Think ahead about the types of people you’ll be sharing your boards with, from personal to professional collaborators.
PERSONAL COLLABORATORS
Main categories like Attire, Beauty and Parties & Gifts are conducive to 4 or more additional collaborators other than the couple. Collaborators in these categories may include bridesmaids, other family members and friends. These areas typically do not involve the securing of major outside wedding vendors since they are either DIY tasks for the bride and her bridal party and/or items that can be easily handled online or via retail store outlets. They are usually light, less pressing issues when considering the overall planning process. Because of this, these boards can handle lots of solicited (and unsolicited) advice when trying to make final decisions.
PROFESSIONAL COLLABORATORS
Collaborations on the remaining boards should be reserved for essential decision makers. These decision makers should include the couple, the wedding planner, and 1 outside vendor for the individual category. For example, vendors such as florists, decorators, and photographers benefit greatly from the visual cues and communication that Pinterest offers. These vendors typically welcome this type of interaction and should gladly accept your invitation to join as a collaborator.
ACTIVITY FEED
In June 2018, Pinterest added an Activity feature for group boards. Once you add collaborators to your board(s), you should now see an option above your Pins called ‘Activity’. Here you can reply to fellow board collaborators on the overall board.
If you wish to exchange comments on an individual Pin within the board, click on ‘Your Pins’. Below each Pin, you and your collaborators are given the option to either (1) Like the Pin and/or (2) Reply to the Pin. When a Pin receives a reply, you and your collaborators are able to exchange comments in reference to that specific Pin.
If there are multiple collaborators within your group board, you may specifically address your comments to a specific person by using “@” followed by their username so that they know you are talking to them. Another bonus: whatever comments you exchange amongst your collaborators are only visible to members of your group--so feel free to post away!
As always, you may choose to make these boards private. You may also leave them as public boards if you’d like your “personal collaborators” to view your ideas, but don’t want them to add comments or view the comments between you and your professional collaborators.
At a loss for words?
As you’re Pinning, you may notice that there are items that are either too specific to effectively find via a traditional word search or that you just may not have the words to describe what you’re looking for.
AISLE RUNNERS WEDDING WORD BANK FOR PINTEREST SEARCHES
Here is a list of “commonly-uncommon” and/or frequently forgotten terms associated with weddings.
Unsure of what these wedding words mean? Not to worry, we’re here to help! Check out our free download below for a list of definitions and photos for these common wedding terms.
PINTEREST LENS
Last year Pinterest introduced the Lens feature. It allows users to search Pins using a smartphone camera and/or saved photos to locate similar items.
From the home screen of the Pinterest app, users can click on the camera icon in [or near] the ‘Search’ box at the top of the screen.
This feature is fairly accurate depending primarily on the quality and clarity of your photo. It is great for finding bridal gowns as seen in magazines, exploring floral arrangement styles inspired by your screenshots, discovering hairstyles for your wedding party, and so much more.
Final Thoughts
Although Pinterest is a great tool, you will still receive some in-depth tips from magazines and actual local vendors. As a member of the bridal community, I speak for many when I stress the importance of not completely abandoning print. Local vendors go to great lengths (and expense) to produce ads and gorgeous spreads to promote their businesses.
There is more than enough room for Pinterest, books, magazines, and even newspapers to get in on the wedding planning action. As long as there are first-time brides and grooms, there will always be questions needing answers and multiple sources needed to verify their findings. And while there will always be a little something special about holding a beautiful, glossy bridal magazine in hand, publishers are adjusting with the changing times and placing some of their featured material on Pinterest as well. Just remember that a well-planned event is one in which you are open-minded to recommendations from different resources and you piece all of the information together in a discerning way to create the event you desire.
Want to chat with a wedding planner? Schedule a call today!