Robert Garey

Ever since Twitter went Oprah this past Spring, the strangely addictive social networking tool has become a household name that everyone from Ashton Kutcher to Iranian student dissidents have become associated with. On the cutting edge of social networking crack, there is no shortage of things to do with Twitter– from spreading gossip, blatant self-promotion (see aforementioned Ashton Kutcher), marketing a business, running for political office, and even sharing the birth of your child. Yet few have harnessed Twitter as a means of building a virtual experience around their wedding festivities that is both interactive, informative, and fun.

Twitter can make your wedding more than just an event, for truly, is not your engagement already a festival of celebrations and showers spanning months that finally crescendo to the climactic extravaganza that is your wedding?! Throughout the months leading up to your wedding, there are countless opportunities to reach out and connect with your community, and Twitter proves to be unlike any other tool for just this purpose. With only 140 characters to get your message across, Twitter serves as a megaphone to communicate with your targeted community– as if you were text messaging each of your followers personally. Twitter is also interactive, allowing your community to respond directly to your inquiries, announcements, and instructions. Here is a simple guide to how my fiancee and I have used Twitter to promote, inform, get informed, and inspire our community of supporters throughout our engagement.

Link Your Twitter account to your Facebook profile
With 45 million users, even Twitter can’t touch the networking capacity of Facebook, so as soon as you’ve opened your Twitter account, we recommend linking it to your Facebook profile for maximum coverage of your Twitter messages, or tweets. There are several ways to do this, but perhaps the simplest way is to add the Twitter app to your Facebook profile; this will automatically post your tweets to your Facebook Status Update. I actually receive more responses from my Facebook community through this means than I do from my Twitter followers.

Ask Questions to your Followers
The Twitterverse is legendary for its responsiveness and precision in offering answers to even such heavy questions as “Does anyone have any recommendations for great live jazz/latin bands in the Seattle area?” or “What books should we be reading before getting married?” After tweeting such a survey, our followers, even distant ones not invited to the wedding, often reply within moments with their ideas.

Reminders
Before you start picking up the phone demanding that your procrastinating college friends RSVP to your reception, simply tweet a reminder that they have five days to RSVP before they lose their eating privileges at your wedding, or something like that. Then, in your tweet include a link to your site at Wedding Window where your attendees can promptly respond through the RSVP feature.

Countdown to the BIG DAY
Engagement is gone faster than you can say, “Will you marry me?”, and so to keep your wedding fresh in your followers’ minds, we recommend scheduling periodic tweets counting down to the big day.

Follow Wedding-Related Tweeple
The beauty of Twitter is that it lets you micro-target specific areas of interest (in our case, weddings), and there is certainly no shortage of tweeple tweeting about weddings these days. For example, @WeddingWindow, boasting over 3,500 followers, tweets relevant messages and links to useful resources for all things weddings.

Use a Twitter App(lication)
If you’re really ambitious and want to take full control over your Twitter communication, consider utilizing a Twitter app to take you beyond the basic web interface at www.twitter.com. Twitter’s API is legendary in it’s accessibility among programmers, and thus heaps of free open source applications have been created to help you take control and customize your Twitter account. We recommend using HootSuite or Tweetdeck as your primary platform to manage your Twitter account. These programs enable you to manage multiple Twitter accounts, schedule tweets, and track other followers more intuitively.

If you don’t have an account already, sign up for Twitter and reach out to your community to share your wedding like never before, but we recommend putting up boundaries before you begin living through Twitter more than in real life– tweeting your engagement and wedding is one thing, but tweeting your wedding night and honeymoon is a sure sign of tweetaholism.