Help! What is the shelf life for posting wedding photos?
Help! What is the shelf life for posting wedding photos?
Delia Cai explores the social media etiquette around posting “too much.”
BY Delia Cai
There are certain social media rules we can all agree on: Ghosting a conversation is impolite, and replying “k” to a text is the equivalent of a backhand slap (violent, wrong, and rude). But what about the rest of the rules? When can we really remind someone of our old Venmo request? What happens when someone tries to flirt with you on LinkedIn?
Fortunately, terminally online writers Delia Cai and Steffi Cao are here to answer all your digital quandaries, big or small. Welcome to Fast Company’s new advice column, Posting Playbook. This week, Delia tackles your most pressing questions about posting “too much”—if there is such a thing.
What is the shelf life for posting wedding photos?
Weddings are, amongst many other things, incredible content generators. We all know this, and we have all largely surrendered to this cursed knowledge. But you are correct in sensing a limit to how many wedding photos you should be circulating and recirculating out on the world wide web in its direct aftermath. Because it doesn’t matter if your wedding was the most amazing, unicorns-dancing-under-waterfalls level of magic to ever occur on god’s mossy green earth—look, I’m sure it was!—but aside from your parents and your partner, no one else really wants to relive it more than once or twice after it’s over.
In my view, you’re allowed to count your wedding as two distinct online “events.” The first is the wedding itself—the literal event—which you can and should treat as a blank check for posting if that’s how you want to spend your day. (I say this with zero judgment; ever since I was a little girl, the dream of marrying the love of my life barely edges out the dream of perusing the resulting tagged mentions all at once in a day-after champagne-infused stupor.) The second event, assuming you’ve hired a photographer with a normal turnaround time, is what we can call the “Wedding Album Drop,” where all the official photos arrive. You can go ham with the posting on this day, too. But then THAT’S IT.
What I’m saying is that posting wedding photos isn’t so much a question of quantity as it is a temporal consideration: no one will judge a big blitz on two very understandably exciting occasions. But everyone will come to despise you and your domestic bliss if you go for the slow-drip release for months afterward. You do have to go find a personality that isn’t just “married” eventually. So if you’ve already shared the wedding album, hold your fire until the anniversary rolls around (at which time, I’m begging you personally, avoid using any variant of the caption “X years down,” because what are you counting down to? Death?).
Do I have to repost when people tag me in Instagram Stories?
Compared to the traditional timeline intake of Instagram, Instagram Stories is more of an opt-in experience: if someone is 16 slides deep on your birthday party recap, they chose to be there. In my view, this means that there’s no such thing as too much posting on Stories. So if you’re worried about your audience being annoyed about, like, looking at more photos of you taken by a third party, don’t be. That’s kind of what they’re there for.
But it sounds like you might be more concerned about the particulars of the social exchange that occurs when someone tags you. Reposting a mention, of course, is a perfectly nice way to acknowledge that someone has gone out of their way to acknowledge you. But it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, and that’s okay—you can also simply double-tap heart reply instead, or say “thanks!.” Where you might run into trouble is if you get in a habit of, say, reposting certain mentions instead of others, or excluding someone’s tags repeatedly. To use the birthday party example: if everyone’s tagging photos of you blowing out your cake, you should probably repost all of them or none at all. Mentions are tiny little gifts, and no one wants to feel like theirs was the worst one.
Is it annoying to have each piece of sushi at an omakase be its own Instagram Story?
Okay, apparently, I’m wrong. There is such a thing as too much Instagram Storying if you’re out here doing this! Stop it! Unless you are going full Anthony Bourdain and devoting a highly produced narrative spotlight on each bite of your dinner and its provenance, the people do not need to know.
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