B is for Business, Blogs and Brides
Following the bird watching industry social media analysis, here’s another one relevant to the wedding industry.
Business: Every year in the United States, there are approximately 2.5 million weddings. Weddings have grown to become a $40 billion per year industry.
Brides: They’ll spend more money on that one day than they will on any other day of their lives (with the exceptions of buying houses and paying for their kids’ weddings).
Blogs: In social media words, such a large business segment translates in a broad community of wedding bloggers/twitterers aggregating an audience of millions who are going through their wedding process. That is, approximately: 2.5 million weddings * 2 brides/grooms * 2 helping mothers * 40% who read blogs.
For brands playing into the wedding industry, understanding the key voices and the nature of the conversations taking place in social media represents a critical knowledge in support of any marketing activities.
Let’s have a look at the blogging piece of the SM wedding puzzle. For that purpose, we’ll analyze our tribe of 699 wedding bloggers, 80% of whom are located in the US and 20% elsewhere.
Who’s Who? The Top 20 Wedding Blogs:
In term of audience, the top 3 have a cumulated audience of more than 200k unique visitors per month as indicated below; alltogether, this community is well above the millions unique visitors per month:
How are they connected? A look at the network formed by this tribe shows several clusters (clockwise: green/yellow, red, light blue, salmon, magenta, green, orange/yellow) corresponding to smaller networks within the community:
What’s the conversation about?
The cloud above shows 3 main topical categories:
- Wedding Planning
- Critical components of a successful wedding: Cake, dress, invitations, photography
- People: Bride, Groom, Friends and Family
If we drill down in the planning category, we find that it’s all about:
- making that day special (see keywords like fun/beautiful/party),
- understanding it’s a complex process (details, help, planner)
- being inspired (inspiration, idea)
- friends and family (guest, friends and family)
Brands in the wedding industry should pay close attention to the new breed of movers and shakers:
- Know who they are and what makes them unique
- Understand what is hot and important
- Engage and help them in their activity by doing something buzz worthy
- Build long term relationship with them. It’s a network economy
I follow quite a few of these blogs and love how they support one another with the ultimate goal of inspiring brides. Kudos to our hometown blog Bride’s Café for making the list!
When I was getting married the blogs were my best freinds when it came to advice and suggestions.