1bigpresent.com Blog

Well, if you had said to me some weeks back that I would ever find my way into the UK’s top 100 wedding tweeters courtesty of easyweddingsearch.com, I would have been somewhat disbelieving, so imagine my total shock a couple of weeks back to find myself ranked at Number 57, without even knowing, and gaining more Twitter followers by the minute!  I had no idea that I was tweeting at such a rate.  Uh Oh! Now comes the dilemma: was I being a good girl or a very bad girl for tweeting so much?  To rank in the top 100 though I have it under good authority that we have to tweet with quality and not just aim for quantity, hmmm so it’s harder than it seems then!

Twitter, as many of us in the wedding industly are discovering, can be the most wonderful networking tool! It is also however extremely time consuming and can provide a massive distraction from other jobs, as you find yourself so easily sidetracked into checking out all sorts of entertaining posts and blogs, or even just by chatting to twitter friends or indeed to twitter strangers!!!  I have loved tweeting to all and sundry and checking out the latest gossip, which quite often hits twitter before many other forms of media, however last week I came face to face with some fellow tweeps at the recent Wedding Affair networking event!  That was actually rather strange, and an excellent example of how easy it is to become ’someone else’ on social networking sites.  Perhaps at their most confident and outgoing on twitter some of my ‘friends’ were not at all as I imagined them to be, and even I, who can happily spout some amount of twitter drivel, felt somewhat ‘naked’ without my twitter persona.

That aside, without welcoming twitter into our lives we would most likely not even have known that one another existed, and so I feel that we must embrace this magnificent networking tool….until the next one comes along to intrigue us!! 

Now I’m off to improve my ranking in this exciting top 100! The pressure is well and truly on!!

Not blogged for a while and had my backside booted for that very reason, so here we are again.  In the life of ’she who eats, sleeps and breathes’ 1bigpresent.com, it can be such a headache each day to establish which tools are most effective in driving traffic to the website.  I try my best to keep each flame alive, namely a little bit of Twitter (follow 1bigpresent), a little Facebook and some strategic ads and editorial placed here and there, but all whilst keeping within a reasonable budget, oh and just working hard to keep everything about the site fresh and up to date.  It is oh so easy to let the purse strings go and to run with every suggestion, especially when you are keen to try new ideas, but common sense soon gets the better of you and reigns you back in.  At lease  blogging doesn’t come with a large invoice, so yes, it’s time I got back in the saddle!! 

I would be fibbing if I was to say that there are not many headaches with running a site such as 1bigpresent; the biggest to date has been finding it’s niche, somewhere for it to fit when marketing!  It isn’t a site selling gifts or presents, it is actually a service which does a beautiful job of linking everyone together, no matter where they are in the world, towards a fabulous birthday or wedding gift or just the cash to buy what you need.  But headache aside I love it’s diversity!  We are currently holding gift accounts for a massive civil ceremony in Ireland, a marriage across two cultures (Hong Kong and UK), and a couple getting married in Italy, having a reception in the UK and then leaving for their new life in Oz.  Most wedding/civil couples use their gift fund for a honeymoon (or to pay their credit card bill after the honeymoon!) but we have seen some original and interesting gift ideas going on, namely a renovation holiday home project to which all guests are invited when it’s complete, a unique piece of Scottish artwork, oh and my absolute favourite, the Sonos music system which allows you to play unlimited music around your home.  This was a request from one of last year’s birthday people on 1bigpresent.com and after reading her fabulous account of the product I have to say I succumbed and am now the delighted owner of a Sonos S5 Zone Player and the impossible to put down hand held controller, which to my shame I must admit I am incredibly possessive of.  And so I guess one of the loveliest things about running 1bigpresent is sharing in a little bit of each celebration and knowing how much the service helps each wedding couple or birthday person to achieve what they want in a gift.  Does that cure my 1bigpresent headache?  Hmmm nope, I still need 1bigparacetamol for that!!