We want to make online information in the UK wedding industry easy to find and share.

We started by making UK Wedding Tweeters and Blogs easier to find. Well now, I’d like to introduce the list of UK Wedding Facebook Pages.

www.easyweddingsearch.com/facebook/

This list updates every Wednesday and shows the Top 100 Facebook pages from UK wedding brands ordered by the number of likes their page has.

It’s an early version. A first step.

We actually know about far more than just the top 100 FB pages. Soon, we’ll add the ability to find these other pages so you can connect with more people in the industry.

Currently, the list is ordered by Like numbers but if we find this doesn’t give an accurate representation or is easily cheated, we’ll add more ranking factors to the mix.

For now, enjoy this new addition to our site.

If you wish to add your Facebook page to the list or check whether we know about it, please head here: www.easyweddingsearch.com/facebook/add.htm

If you have any comments, questions or feedback why not add them below?:

Finally we are on Facebook. Please visit our page and Like us to keep up to date with all that’s going here at Easy Wedding Search.

www.facebook.com/EasyWeddingSearch

Are you ready for it?

Some Stats

• Google’s research shows that 28% of British mobile users have used their phone to make a purchase.
• 36% of the UK population now own a smartphone.
• 20 million people connect to the web from their mobile phone – up from 14 million in 2010.
• 53% of people who own a smartphone in the UK are using it while watching TV.
• 24% of British smartphone owners use their phones for comparing product price while in shops.

New Mobile Wedding Site

Today I’m happy to announce the new Easy Wedding Search mobile website.

www.easyweddingsearch.com/m/

We have had a mobile site for about 2 years now but it needed an update. From today, if you visit our website using an internet enabled smartphone or a tablet, you will be automatically taken to the new mobile site. Don’t worry, you can always go back to the desktop site if you prefer.

The new mobile site is much more user friendly and built on touch technology making it feel more like a native app (tech speak for the apps you download from the app store/market place).

As well as the mobile wedding directory, there are also new sections of the site that are now mobile friendly including this blog, the Top 100 Wedding Tweeters list and UK Wedding Blogs.

Try it out now!

Prepare for the Mobile Rush

More and more brides and grooms will be researching their suppliers and looking for wedding information and inspiration on their phones, iPads and other mobile devices.

Have you checked how many visitors to your website are using their mobiles to see it? If you have Google Analytics installed then you can easily check.

Simply go to the ‘Visitors’ tab in the navigation and click on the ‘Mobile Devices’ report. You’ll be able to see how many visitors came to your site using a mobile and which device they used to access it.

Why a Mobile Site Is a Good Idea

Sure, mobile browsing technology is good enough to render a full website, but providing an experience tailored to mobile devices has lots of benefits including:

• It’s Faster! – People don’t like hanging about. They want information and they want it now! If they have to wait for minutes for your bulky image rich website to load on their slow mobile connection, they WILL leave. Mobile sites are much faster and suited for slower mobile connections.
• Usability Is Better – Full desktop websites are designed for big screens, keyboards and your point and click mouse. Navigating these sites on your phone can sometimes be tricky. You have to zoom in and out of webpages, try and click impossible drop down menus and use clunky features made using Javascript that aren’t supported fully on phones. With a tailored mobile site, moving from page to page is easy. Also, all the content fits on the smaller sized screen and so you don’t need to zoom in and out.
• Overcomes Bad Flash Support – Lots of smart phones and tablets now support Flash but to be honest it can be a bit clumsy to use. Providing a fast HTML mobile site would give the user a much nicer experience.

How To Easily Create A Mobile Website

If you don’t have the budget or the expertise to create a mobile site, there are some easier ways of having a mobile website presence. Here are a few:

Onbile

Onbile lets you easily create a mobile website with the basic details and features of your wedding company’s full website. After you have customised the design and content, it will spit out some code which you then add to your main website.

WP Touch

WP Touch is a plugin specifically for WordPress blogs. You have to pay for the PRO version but the free WP Touch plugin is good enough with plenty of options for customisation.

Google Sites

Google Sites now has mobile templates you can use. If you host your website with Google Sites or you simply want to create a mobile landing page then this might be for you.

Over To You

Can you recommend any other mobile technologies? What’s your mobile website strategy? Let me know in the comments below…

Today I’d like to announce the BETA release of a new feature of our site dedicated to the UK wedding blogosphere.

UK Wedding Blogs follows the success of UK Wedding Tweeters and aims to make blogs easier to find. There are so many blogs and so much great content out there but so far finding it is difficult…until now.

Still in its infancy and with so many great features to come, UK Wedding Blogs will help people find the best blogs and the best content from wedding related blogs in the UK.

Let’s run through the various features:

Top 100 Wedding Blogs

Of course there had to be a Top 100 List! Each blog has been rated using multiple sources to determine the popularity and quality of the blog. This feature therefore lists the best 100 wedding blogs in the UK.

To work out the list we take many different signals into account like the number of links the blog has from other websites and how popular the blog has been on social networking sites.

Wedding Buzz

Wedding Buzz is a feature in its early stages of development. It lists the best blog posts and content from the last few days. Great for some lunch time reading, you can rest assured that you’ll only be reading the best content around.

Blog Directory

If you are looking for new blogs to read then use our blog directory.
Categorised into different subjects, e.g. wedding photography blogs, you’ll be able to find great new sites in the topics you’re interested in.

Blog Profiles

Each blog in the system has its own profile page including a link to the blog, a thumbnail image of the home page and recent updates. The recent posts also have the number of ‘Shares’ on Twitter and the number of ‘Likes’ on Facebook.

I hope you enjoy UK Wedding Blogs and use it to find great new content being produced by the UK’s awesome wedding bloggers.

www.easyweddingsearch.com/blogs/

If you have any questions or comments please don’t hesitate to ask below. Remember it’s in BETA so you may encounter a few bugs. If you do, let us know!

Enjoy!

Christian

Social Network shares are becoming ever more important for both direct traffic generation and search engine optimisation not to mention the host of other indirect benefits.

More and more social savvy brides are ‘Liking’, ‘Tweeting’, ‘Digging’, ‘Stumbleuponing’ and sharing content across the major social media networks.

With this in mind I’d like to introduce a simple no frills tool that allows you to input any website URL to see how many times it has been shared on the major social sites.

Social Media Shares Tool

Use it to track how many times your website has been shared or track the viral effect of your latest blog post. It’s up to you which website address you put in, it doesn’t have to be wedding related.

Bookmarklet

To make it even easier and more convenient for you there’s a handy little bookmarklet available. Simply drag the link found at the bottom of the Social Shares Tool up to your bookmarks toolbar of your browser. Then, when your visiting a web page and you want to see how many times that URL has been shared, simply click on the ‘Social Shares’ bookmark and a new page will open giving you all the info you need.

Feedback

As always, if you like it let others know about it, if you don’t like it, let ME know about it. You are welcome to leave any questions, comments or feedback in the comments below.

I hope you find it useful.

www.easyweddingsearch.com/pro/sharestool/

Just a quick post for all those users currently on Twitter and part of the UK Wedding Tweeters.

I have updated the profile page and you should now be able to see your ranking for this week. This new addition was a popular request and will allow Tweeters who are outside of the Top 100 to see where exactly they rank out of all the wedding Tweeters being followed (currently over 800!).

The screen shot above shows where your ranking can be found. Simply visit your profile page:
www.easyweddingsearch.com/twitter/tweep/[enter your Twitter user name here]
e.g.
www.easyweddingsearch.com/twitter/tweep/wimagazine

Some Important Notes

- Some Tweeps may see the word ‘Low’ instead of a specific ranking. This means they do not have a score for this week. It could be because they haven’t Tweeted in a while or their Tweets aren’t considered quality enough.

- The Top 100 Tweeters updates every Friday usually in the morning. The ranking on the individual profile pages may not reflect the new score until 24 hours after the Top 100 list has been refreshed.

If you have any comments, questions or ideas for new features please let me know in the comments below:

Some big news this weekend, Confetti has gone into administration after being sold last week to The Hut Group, who provide digital solutions for companies such as PC World, WH Smith and Lovefilm amongst others.

Its many shops and the hugely popular website, used by thousands of UK brides, are now under threat of closing down.
Confetti’s previous owner Findel, sold the company as part of a strategy to reduce its debts, which stood at £309.6m in April 2010.

A forum post on the Confetti website announced the news to its community:

Lovely B2B. I am really sorry to tell you that Confetti was sold last week to The Hut Group.
It has since gone in to administration.
I will update the forums with any news.
This will affect all our users, I’m afraid because the online shop has already been closed while the administrators assess the situation. This is obviously out of our control.

Will you miss Confetti if it goes? I will. It’s a fantastic brand, with loyal, informed users who rely on the content, shop and forums to help them plan what will be the best day of their lives.

Immediately, concerned brides began posting questions regarding orders they have placed with the hugely popular site. Many users were also deeply saddened by the news. One user, Gemzie, replied:

OMG gutting!
This is a really good place for all us B2B’s and some H2B’s
What am i going to do? Love this place and the fetti ladies!

So what will this mean for wedding businesses?

If you are a paid advertiser on the site then this may obviously affect you. Once the situation has developed further, get in touch with the Confetti team and see what your options are.

For everyone else this could be a wonderful opportunity! If you sell wedding gifts, favours and other similar items that Confetti used to sell, you could benefit from its previous customer base. This could be an opportune time to do an intense burst of advertising perhaps using Google Adwords. Another perhaps cheeky way of benefiting from the situation is to do some subtle marketing on Confetti’s forums. Offer Confetti’s unhappy customers with an alternative.

Confetti.co.uk has a huge user base and is a very strong brand. I imagine the big online industry guns such as the bridal magazines will be battling it out for a slice of Confetti’s bridal user pie.

What do you think of this news? Will you be actively seeking to benefit from the closing of Confetti? Have you been affected positively or negatively from this? I’d love to know….

I’ve been receiving a lot of questions on how the Twitter Top 100 List works and which factors are taken into account to calculate the list.

Whilst I won’t divulge the exact algorithm, I will explain the thinking behind the list and what it’s meant to represent.

The reason for creating the Top 100 Tweeters was simple. I wanted to find out which UK wedding professionals were on Twitter and who the good Tweeters to follow were.

I started by following as many of the UK wedding Tweeters as I could find. Now, every time I find a new UK wedding pro on Twitter, I’ll follow them. I am currently following over 450 UK wedding professionals!

If I’m not yet following you, make sure you follow me (@ukWeddings) and I’ll add you to my follower list (if you’re UK based).

To create the Top 100 list I began to research and think about what really makes a valuable Tweeter….

So, here are some guiding principles on providing value to your followers and the UK wedding community on Twitter. You never know, following them might help you jump up the Twitter Top 100 List “wink” “wink”

Tweet!

There’s not a lot of point in setting up an account if you’re not going to Tweet.

Whilst we are all busy, there’s no excuse not to Tweet at least once every couple of days…particularly as Tweeting can be done on your smart phone, via SMS text message, on your home computer, through your Xbox 360 etc etc

Twitter is a social network, so start socialising and start networking. Networking with other industry professionals should be part of your core marketing strategy. Relationship building is key to any business.

Help Others

If someone you follow asks a question or needs help with something, help them!

You never know, they may return the favour in future but also, they will be more likely to follow you, communicate with you, retweet your tweets and spread your messages and content to others.

Share interesting and Useful Content

Sure, Twitter can and is used as a marketing channel. By all means, share your latest photoshoot or announce your latest blog post but don’t just promote yourself.

Try and give back to the community by sharing content you have found which you think is useful or provides some value to others.

Get Retweeted

By doing all the above, Tweeters will start retweeting you. This can have a massive viral effect as your Tweets begin to spread across the Twitterverse.

Grow Your Followers (Naturally)

There are many tools and schemes out there that allow you to suddenly get one million gazillion followers. HINT: as tempting as they may be, these tools offer you no value and you’ll look really spammy to others.

By helping, communicating, being polite, retweeting and offering value to other Tweeters, your follower numbers will increase naturally over time.

Summary

So there you go, the Top 100 list is simply a reflection on your value within the UK wedding Twitter community.

I know what you’re thinking. You were expecting this post to include exact details on how to get higher up the list. The reason I can’t tell you exactly is the same reason Google doesn’t tell you it’s secret sauce on how to get to the top of their listings. If everyone knew, everyone would do the same and the results wouldn’t be relevant.

My simple advice would be to follow the basic principles of being a valuable Tweeter. Make yourself a Tweeter who others need to follow for the fear of missing out on one of your brilliant Tweets. May the power of Twitter be with you!

If you have any questions or comments, please don’t hesitate to ask below.

Today, I would like to announce a new section of Easy Wedding Search dedicated to Twitter.

100s of wedding professionals are now Tweeting each day. Some are using this social networking tool to great effect creating conversation and buzz around their products and services.
Not only is it proving to be a great tool for attracting and communicating with customers but it has also opened up a new door for networking with other wedding industry professionals.

With this in mind, UK Wedding Tweeters was born.

UK Wedding Tweeters is a group of projects that brings together the community of UK Wedding suppliers and services on Twitter. Use it to find new people to follow and also discover what these tweeters are sharing with their followers.

UK Wedding Tweeters is made up of the following features:

Top 100 Wedding Tweeters

This is a list of the 100 best tweeters in the UK wedding industry ordered by influence and popularity.

Like many other basic lists out there, this one is not ordered by follower numbers alone. Follower and friend numbers can easily be manipulated so it would be easy to get to the top spots by cheating the system. To avoid this, many factors are taken into account to work out which Tweeters are the most popular and influential.

If you’ve made it to the Top 100 list, congratulations! Help yourself to a badge for your site or blog.

Wedding Tweeter Profile

Each UK wedding tweeter in our database has their own Wedding Tweeter profile regardless of whether they appear in the Top 100 list or not.

The profile contains some of their latest tweets, bio information, avatar, stats and URLs and photos recently shared.

e.g. Wedding Ideas Magazine

Top Shared Links

This is a list of the most shared URLs in the last 24 hours by UK Wedding Tweeters. Using this list, you can determine what content is currently hot and frequently being tweeted and visited.

Twitter Stats

Using the data we have collected, we can identify some fascinating facts, figures, stats and trends about the habits of UK Wedding Tweeters. This section is currently in development.

QUICK FAQ

I am UK Wedding Tweeter, how do I add myself to your list of Tweeters?

Firstly check if you are already in our database. Simply copy the following URL into your browser and replace ‘username’ with your Twitter username:
www.easyweddingsearch.com/twitter/tweep/username
e.g.
www.easyweddingsearch.com/twitter/tweep/wimagazine
If your profile page appears, well done, you’re in! If you don’t see your profile, then you’re not yet on the list. But don’t worry…
If you are a UK wedding professional on Twitter, simply follow our Twitter account @ukWeddings, you’ll then get added to the list…easy!

How do I get in the Top 100 Tweeters list?

The Top 100 UK Wedding Tweeter list is made up of the most popular and influential wedding tweeters in the UK. We measure many different factors to determine who gets in the list.
We update this list on a weekly basis.
If you are an active tweeter who provides value to the industry and the rest of the Twitter community, then you’ll be added.

If you have any questions or feedback on this new feature of the site, please let us know in the comments below.

There has never been a better time to start advertising on Easy Wedding Search. We have some great new features including unlimited videos and photos and also some very exciting things coming soon!!

To warm you up in these cold winter months we would like to offer all new advertisers 15% off any new wedding listings.

Simply use the following discount code during the sign up process: winterwarmer

Hurry as this voucher code is only available for new customers from today until the end of January! Click on the link below for more information on advertising on Easy Wedding Search.

Enjoy!!

Wedding Advertising Information