This success story of an Online Wedding Planning Startup explains why Wedding Planners are all over Social Media these days

Scroll down your Facebook account, and what you see is almost everyone is getting hitched. It’s like there is no marriage season anymore, because there are marriages happening round the year. Precisely why there has been a boom in online wedding planning space in the recent past. More and more entrepreneurs have jumped into the fray. As each player is trying to get the maximum leverage out of this rising demand, a new startup Wedmegood has got some of the tricks going right for them compared to others. Folks here are killing it on social media!

Active on Instagram for about 18 months now, the firm has crossed 1,00,000 likes. It’s got 10,000 followers on Pinterest in the span of 8-9 months and more than 60,000 on Facebook. The idea of such a portal was incepted out of a personal problem which founders Anand and Mehak faced while planning their cross-cultural wedding. They realised the need for a trustworthy yet fun platform and after a few months of intense planning and strategizing, they launched their own portal in February, 2014. It is now visited by more than 2 lakh unique visitors every month, has growing followers on social media and it recently picked up a round of funding from IAN and marquee angels like Hemant Kanakia, Alok Mittal, Anupam Mittal and Rishi Parti.

After serving to-be-wed couples for over one and a half years, WedMeGood has recently launched its app. Plans galore, what intrigues us the most is their almost explosive growth on social media. Business Insider got chatting with founder Anand Shahani on this and the conversation resulted in some key insights on how to get users and keep them engaged on social platforms. Check it out:

Your social media fan following is rising by the day. What were the ideas for making it big on social, and how did you go about implementing them?

Weddings are such a high involvement line that most couples start searching for inspiration a year before their wedding. Given that brides are the ones driving decisions we had to reach them where they are most active- Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook and then attract them to our website. Chances are, if they love our social media feed, when the time comes to hire their vendors, they will turn to us at the time as well. There is of course the matter of being a startup, we are always strapped for cash when it comes to marketing, so we knew we had to make sure our organic channel did superbly.

We took some interesting initiatives to get things going for us on social. Like the Snapchat ‘Fan Takeover’ Initiative. So, our fans take to our Snapchat account when attending a wedding. They snap live from the wedding- right from the decor to the dulhan and our snapchat followers get the feeling of attending a wedding, get great ideas and inspiration in the comfort of their homes. We now get requests from planners, brides and grooms to attend their wedding just so they can be on Wedmegood snapchat.

Which one is your biggest traffic driver?
Our Facebook Blog has been the biggest traffic driver. The most successful feature has been our real wedding stories, where we showcase albums of couples who recently tied the knot, and list out the vendors they hired and their experience. Not only does this help in engaging couples hunting for great ideas, but also helps us reach a larger audience as the bride and groom share it on their own social media accounts. Our Real weddings have become so popular that we average 1 wedding submission a day in peak period, though we cannot feature all of them. Over the past year, Pinterest has become one of our strongest platforms as well. Our Pinterest boards are divided in a way, so that you can plan your wedding sitting right there. From Sikh brides to Morning weddings, each image pinned has been described in detail. Pinterest now accounts for almost as much traffic as Facebook.

Okay. It’s rightly said save the best for the last. Your best results are on Instagram. How did that happen?
On Instagram #wedmegood, we currently have over 1,00,000 organic followers. So, we regularly encouraged crowdsourced content from both users and vendors. We told them to upload inspiring wedding photos on their own Instagram and hashtag #wedmegood . We would then repost our favourite tagged photos on our own Insta handle. So far, more than 28,000 photos have been uploaded by others using #wedmegood.

Why did you think of choosing this route of promoting the brand?
Once we realised its importance, we decided to actively educate ourselves as we as founders too wanted to be involved in the social media to set the tone. Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest came naturally given Mehak’s strong content background. However Pinterest and now Snapchat have had a learning curve. We have always believed that an organic audience translates into a higher quality audience - who are genuinely engaged with your brand - and this is what we found in our experience as well. The reason WedMeGood works is because the audience on it is genuinely engaged with the brand and trusts it.

Elated over the overwhelming response, Anand’s wife and co-founder Mehak S Shahani said: “We are seeing extremely high engagement levels from both couples and vendors. Our users spend an average of 5 minutes on site and during their planning period visit us multiple times a week. In a short span of time, we have been able to provide a platform which couples can trust for their wedding decisions and with the upcoming app, we are sure to provide an even better experience for couples across India.”