The desire among couples to make their special day even more memorable has spawned a new category of service providers called wedding social media managers.
These agencies charge ₹50,000 to ₹2,50,000 to create wedding reels that can rake up millions of online views.
These videos are usually emotional or funny. Like a groom crying at the bride’s entry or circling a stack of cash to protect her from ‘evil eye’ or simply presenting a special dance.
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Or the bride’s father adding a touch of humour: “I have a confession to make. I’m broke. Seriously! I’m broke. This girl… she has left me nowhere. I have no option now but to put her room on Airbnb. I have to recover some cost of this wedding.”
Pradeep Nor, 26 and Rinkal Sidhiya, 27, a Mumbai-based couple who tied the knot in the city in December, took that route.
“Initially, we thought that the photographers and videographers make such reels,” Sidhiya said.
“However, while reviewing the Instagram pages of other couples with viral reels, we discovered that there are dedicated teams they hire for this job.”
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Unlike photographers who take a couple of weeks, these agencies deliver fully edited social media videos the same day.
“Another advantage was that they used minimal professional equipment, giving us access to shoot at a wider range of locations as some venues we picked restricted the use of professional cameras,” Sindhiya said.
The couple hired Dream Day Documentary, which shot bite-sized clips of the bride and the groom, and guests on an iPhone, compiled and edited them into aesthetic and engaging reels and posted them on the couple’s social media page.
Within a few days, some of those reels touched a million views. The couple paid the agency ₹60,000-70,000 compared to the ₹2.5 lakh the photographers charged.
“Apart from theirs, we covered seven other weddings in the first 15 days of December, the average during wedding season,” said Ishita Furia, cofounder of Dream Day Documentary, which started over a year ago. About 85% of weddings that they were hired for were destination events.
Indian weddings have a deep cultural connection and are usually extravagant, making them ideal for creating engaging social media content. And the market is getting bigger.
Mint reported earlier that the wedding industry, which crossed in $75 billion in 2023-24, is poised to grow at 7-8% per annum. According to a report by a wedding technology platform, average spends in 2024 jumped 14% year-on-year, reaching ₹32-35 lakh.
“Wedding content generally tends to do well on social media because of how emotionally charged people are,” said Piyush Agrawal, cofounder of influencer management agency CREATE.
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“Weddings have high cultural relevance, and people spend so lavishly on them that they want to amplify it online for others to see,” Agrawal said, adding that a lot of these couples are also aspiring influencers.
A big trend in smaller cities too
It’s not couples just like Pradeep and Rinkal from the metros who want their wedding reels to go viral. There is a huge interest in generating such content in smaller cities as well.
“We receive 60-70 requests from couples and their kids to share their reels on our page,” said Parthip Thyagarajan, chief executive officer of WeddingSutra, which started in 2000 and has over 1.5 million followers on Instagram. “A large chunk of these requests, about 70%, are from tier II and III cities such as Raipur, Ludhiana, Jaipur, and Indore, which have a rich wedding culture.”
Wedding content on social media has become a big trend in the past year, he said.
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The couples ready to “to do it for the gram” were born between 1990 and 2000s, a generation of millennials and older GenZs that was an early adopter of social media and technology.
A large chunk of such couples is used to sharing life online, and the others just want to create a personal digital album that is accessible, said Smriti Agarwal, founder of the wedding social media agency Mush Me Too and a former marketer.
“The content shot by the teams is very raw, real and relatable, which people, especially couples going to get married, like to watch repeatedly share on social media.”
