There is a lot of writing that goes on about this “digital generation” of engaged couples. So being a (not so secret) bunch of geeks and in the business of selling gorgeous wedding websites (precisely to these lovely, beautiful, wonderful, we love you, choose us!, couples), we decided to collect some mad filthy DATA! (filthy is used by high school kids to mean “awesome”, for those of you not in the know).
This is just the first post in a series from thousands of tweets and facebook posts (Rowfeeder Rocks) related to weddings. Lots of fun information to come on things like cakes, dresses, and WIC. Taking requests too…
Let’s dig in to our first data set: Peeps tweeting #wedding 12,616 times over the course of a month (mid May-mid June 2010). Data first, funny videos at the end of the post 
So who is tweeting about #weddings?
Turns out, it’s us, vendors and blogs for the most part.
What are people talking about?
Mostly themselves…but that’s really true of all of twitter, so I can’t be harsh. Plus, I don’t know anything more interesting in the whole world than what I am thinking about right now; I’m guessing you can relate.
- 77.2% of posts had a URL in them, so they were tweeting about content on the web
- Over 65% of theses urls were content that was their own
- Of these urls, the 5 most retweeted were spammy Etsy or Zazzle stores trying to promote their wedding related jewelry.
- Most legitimate retweeted URLs:
- Video production company that produces “pre-wedding videos” for couples. This url, combined with three others was tweeted over 60 times. The video isn’t like the amazing Jeff and Erin’s Epic Wedding Trailer (which if you haven’t seen, you must), but seriously, what is?!? But it shows you that people are really interested in the story of the couple.
- SLR Lounge, a digital photography blog (presumably that wedding photographers fancy)
- OfcourseIdo.com – Like an ezine articles for weddings
Again, you can see it’s mostly self promotion within the wedding industry.
Now, Let’s check out some smexy word density (articles removed, #wedding removed):
Sorry Love, our wedding is about our albums albums albums and vintage jewelry we found on etsy from great designers designers related to my family.
And what about the “Top Tweeters”?
Schnikes! Over 10% of tweets with #wedding came from 3 ADHD tweeters.
- @Yourweddinglive is a UK website that will stream your wedding live on the internet. Their site doesn’t tell you they do live tweet transcription, but their tweet volume would indicate this much. Who knows if this business will survive long term, but there is at least one company devoted wholly to live streaming weddings – super interesting.
- @EventSavvy seems like a lovely Colorado event planner named Daisy Grau that tweets a lot about celebrity weddings.
- @MyWeddingNews: well they just retweet wedding related news, who woulda thunk ?!?
Again – all vendor/media folks.
Most Followed people tweeting about #weddings?
- Jeanette Joy Fisher, a TLC personality that does house flipping.
- Swissmiss – a fabulous Swiss designer living and blogging from NYC
- MSNBC – reporting on why you should have a prenuptial agreement
- Penguin Group – plugging a new novel of theirs about a bride
- Calvin Lee – a self proclaimed “media ho” with tons of followers that tweeted about his dinner from a wedding. It might have been delicious, but looks an awful lot like different colored squid.
- Pye – A very popular wedding photographer from LA who loves to rock out the HDR and has slightly creepy avatar (portfolio looks great though)
What’s the moral of this story?
Us, wedding professionals, combined with spammers dominate the volume of tweets related to weddings. But that’s ok, as long people are eyes wide open about it. We [Nearlyweds] use twitter primarily to engage with fabulous stationery designers and lure them into our super awesome system where they can create matching wedding websites for brides. We also use Twitter in some novel ways to engage with and acquire new customers (that we are keeping to ourselves for the moment) that has been very successful. But primarily, Twitter seems to be a B2B exercise in the wedding industry…which is great. If you are a new wedding vendor to the biz, just don’t wet your pants or bet your business on finding all your customers via Twitter. But you can find lots of vendors and bloggers on twitter.
Now for the funny videos:
Best wedding videos that were tweeted (imho):
- Wedding Party Falling into a Lake
- Robot Presiding over Japanese Wedding (Oh dear)
- Proposal in Washington Square Park (Fun, but long)
And a special thanks to our boyz at Rowfeeder who helped us track tweets and facebook posts we then analyzed.