NEW YORK (July 21, 2014) – TheKnot.com, the leading online wedding planning destination, and Mashable, the leading media company for the Connected Generation and the voice of digital culture, today released the results of their #SocialWeddingSurvey, a co-branded social media and wedding planning survey. Compared with the 2012 #SocialWeddingSurvey, these results highlight a significant change in how couples are leveraging social media—or choosing to unplug—for their day.

“We’ve seen a shift in how couples use social media around their weddings,” says Carley Roney, co-founder of TheKnot.com. “While couples are plugged into mobile apps for planning and sharing photos of their wedding on social media, they’re looking to control what their guests are posting.”

Highlights From The Knot and Mashable #SocialWeddingSurvey Include:

Mobile Apps Rule Planning
Nearly 9 in 10 (89 percent) couples download wedding planning apps to their mobile phones, up from 61 percent in 2012. To stay on top of their to-do lists, one in five couples (19 percent) download mobile checklist apps and 15 percent use organizational apps. Thirteen percent of couples keep their finances top of mind with budgeting apps, and 12 percent anticipate the day with a countdown app.

Wedding #Hashtags
As a way to create a virtual community for this event, 55 percent of couples use a wedding hashtag, up more than 40 percent from only 9 percent of to-be-weds in 2012, and 20 percent use it across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Ten percent of couples did not create a hashtag and wish they had.

Sharing Photos
A majority of couples (57 percent) are on board with guests posting photos from their wedding on Facebook or Instagram. However, 35 percent have mixed feelings about what their guests share, and nearly 1 in 10 (8 percent) couples do not like social photo sharing because they want to control which photos are public. These couples have guests turn off their phones during the ceremony, or ask guests to wait until after the professional photos have posted to share their own images on social media; 31 percent of couples limit guests from sharing on social media in some way.