Wedding Hashtag | Are They Worth The Time?

If you’ve been to a wedding in the past few years, you may have noticed that nearly everyone has a wedding hashtag! Nearly everyday, I log into Facebook and find brides asking for help creating their wedding hashtag. Wedding blogs offer free wedding hashtag generators that create clever combinations of the couple names. You get the idea, they’re the latest and greatest!

My sister always jokes with me that she’s not going to have a wedding photographer. She says that she’s going to use a wedding hashtag for her wedding photographs. As funny as she thinks she is, I’m sure you can imagine just how much that irks me. But after her joking so much about it, I started to pay attention to wedding hashtags.

As a photographer, I love the idea of using a hashtag to gather your guests viewpoints of your wedding day! Honestly, Austin and I just want our couples to have as many photographs to cherish their wedding day as possible. However, rarely have we found a wedding hashtag that has successfully gathered a lot of photographs.

Almost every wedding has a sign or board that gives instructions on how to share the ‘grams with the happy couple. I’ve seen it go as far as being printed on the dessert napkins! However, nine times out of ten, the hashtags get less than twenty images from an entire wedding. Considering that nearly every person comes to a wedding with a phone, I feel that the amount of photos your guests are sharing are more than they are actually hash-tagging.

But if they don’t work, are they even worth the time? Yes and no.

If you’re a bride stressing out about the perfect wedding hashtag, no, they aren’t worth the time. Your wedding won’t be uncool if you don’t have a hashtag. And even more likely, I doubt anyone would even notice that there wasn’t a board with your hashtag. I feel that it’s just one extra thing on your todo list. It’s not worth the extra stress!

However, if you have the time and come up with a hashtag you like, why the heck not? Twenty photographs are more than no photographs, right? If you’re going to do a wedding hashtag, here a few tips we have to help make them a little more successful.

1. Use your wedding hashtag  on your own photographs leading up to your wedding.

   I’ve seen this done successfully with several of our couples over the past year. When you are out and about wedding planning and post a photo on social media, using your wedding hashtag not only helps document and file your wedding journey, but it helps your friends remember your hashtag. They’ll more than likely click on the hashtag and follow along. When it comes to your wedding day, they’ll naturally hashtag their wedding snaps with your wedding hashtag.

2. Add a little reminder on your thank you card.

   More than likely your guests have actually shared images on social media. But what’s also likely is that they were partying it up at your reception and couldn’t remember your hashtag. In your thank you card, you could add a little note with your hashtag and that you’d love to see their snaps.

3. Keep it simple.

   In the words of Don Draper, “Make it simple but significant.” The more extravagant it is, the less likely people are going to remember it.

While we definitely don’t recommend a wedding hashtag as your main source of photographs, wedding hashtags have the potential to help you relive your wedding day through the eyes of your guests. We just believe it takes a little more effort to get them. If you’re willing to put in the extra effort to gather those photographs, go for it! If you’re stressing out about that perfectly clever wedding hashtag, stress-less and ask your bridesmaids and family for their photos after your wedding day. It’s not worth losing a few years off your life over them!

We’d love to hear your wedding hashtag stories and ideas. Comment below so we can hear your ideas and what you recommend!

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