How Pinterest can be an asset when planning your wedding
Planning a wedding can be fun. It can be tricky to keep track of all the great ideas and that’s where apps like Pinterest come in handy.
There is an abundance of sources of information and inspiration available to help you plan your big day. You might find it useful to seek personal recommendations from your venue or wedding planner, or to consult magazines, visit shops and explore online resources. One of the biggest challenges is remembering where you saw that brilliant idea for table centres or the name of the creative florist whose designs really appeal.
If you’re not already aware of Pinterest, the best way to describe it is as similar to an online scrapbook. You can search for ideas, bookmarking and saving the best ones by organising them into groups known as boards. You’re in control of organising, so everything will be just where you expect to find it.
Searching Pinterest
Searching for inspiration on Pinterest is simple – just type keywords into the search box, for example ‘bridal hairpieces’, and a huge variety of results will be presented. NEW – Pinterest now helps you by providing ‘guides’ which helps you narrow down the results more precisely. Examples for the hairpieces search are “hair down’, ‘with veil’ or ‘vintage’. Each of the search terms comes up individually, so you can delete them if you change your mind without losing the whole search. Next to the Search box is a drop down menu allowing you to click on popular categories such as Weddings and Travel, which are regularly updated by Pinterest.
Like what you see?
All the results you see from your search have been added, or ‘pinned’ by other users. You can find out more about a photograph, or ‘pin’, by clicking on it. You can comment on the pin, ‘like’ it or pin it to your own boards – and this is the best way of keeping these individual bits of inspiration for future reference. Click on the ‘pin it’ button on the top left of the pin. Now you can add the pin to an existing board or create a new one.
Creating boards
It helps to give your new boards a descriptive name – Wedding Venue Choices, Minimoon Destinations or Somerset Wedding Suppliers tell you exactly what’s on the board – and this helps with the social aspect of Pinterest too. Part of the fun is that others can share your discoveries, comment on your finds and maybe make suggestions that will help you too. You can add a ‘Pin It’ widget to your internet browser, to make it easier to save your pins directly to your boards from interesting websites.
Find out more
Once you find something you like, you can click on the pin once more – and it will often take you through to the website where the pin originated. Here you can get more information, find out how to make or bake or even purchase the item in question. The link will open in a new tab, so it’s easy to go back to Pinterest after looking. (Note that some pins are in fact photographs uploaded by others and these won’t link to a website.)
Following
If you find someone who seems to pin lots of amazing ideas, you can choose to follow them – either a particular board or all their boards. This means that everything they pin in future will be presented to you on your home feed next time you’re on Pinterest. You might find that you gain followers of your own before long – like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram this is a social platform and it’s fun to collaborate with others.
Who can pin?
A handy feature of Pinterest is that you can choose who pins to your boards. This is useful if you want to allow your bridesmaids to help with your research, for example – just add them to the list of people who are able to pin. Pinterest will notify you when others interact with your boards.
Private boards
You might want to keep some of your ideas and discoveries to yourself. You might not want the bridesmaids to know what you’re thinking of buying them as a thank-you gift or perhaps you don’t want the world to know all the details of your wedding. Pinterest enables you to create secret boards, which you can share with just those you invite.
Warning – it’s addictive!
Pinterest is a great way of keeping your ideas together but it is easy to lose hours at a time once you start searching, pinning and commenting. It really should come with a warning – great fun, an excellent way to organise your wedding planning ideas and very addictive!
Useful links
https://help.pinterest.com/en/guide/all-about-pinterest/