The average wedding takes months to prepare for and can cost upward of $33,000, according to Cost of Wedding. With so many resources put into the planning of your special day, you definitely want to take advantage of the best ways to connect with your family and friends. Here are a few things you and your fiance should consider when sharing the special moments from your wedding with the important people in your lives.

Get Social

As you’re planning your wedding, you’ll want to come up with a plan as to how you’ll interact with social media as the day approaches. According to a survey conducted by The Knot and Mashable, 28 percent of soon-to-be brides post an announcement on social media within an hour after becoming engaged, and 24 percent more post within one day. Keep in mind that once you put the message out into the world you begin to drive the online conversation about the wedding.

One thing you’ll want to consider is creating a hashtag for your wedding, which can be as easy as your first two names followed by the word “wedding”. Or, if you’d like to add more personality, you can add a play on words or joke that you think will be well received by many of the people you’ve invited. By setting a hashtag for your wedding, it will be much easier to search for all the social media posts related to the big day, and makes your event seem much more official.

Post Photos

Couples spend anywhere from 10 to 15 percent of their total budget on wedding photographers, and it’s now easier than ever to make use of this investment and share your pictures with the people closest to you. But before you start thinking about posting on Facebook and Instagram, you’ll want to set up a cloud storage account with a provider like LiveWire to ensure all of your files are backed up, which keeps you safe from a hard drive failure. It also is an easy way to show certain pictures to a select group of people, if you don’t want to upload all the edited photos to social media sites. If you’d like to dig in deeper and learn more about cloud storage options, check out Top10cloudstorage.com.

When posting on Facebook, you’ll want to cut down your collection to 40 to 50 photos that show off all aspects of the day and feature as many different people as possible. Make sure to tag anyone who appears in the photos because your pictures will be featured on all of their walls and it increases the reach of your post. When posting to Instagram, it can be more fun to post one or two photos a day for the first few days after the wedding, rather than posting them all at once. This is a good way to share a few photos while the majority of them are still being edited.

Get Two Videos

If you hire a professional videographer for your wedding, consider asking him or her for two videos: one as a quick edit of the reception to be delivered a day or two after the wedding, and the second to be a longer more intensive recap of the whole day. This way you’ll have something you can post on Facebook right away that gives your online connections an opportunity to watch you tie the knot while the event is still fresh in everyone’s minds. A few weeks later, when you receive the more cinematic second video, you’ll have a more powerful piece to post online and remind everyone how beautiful your wedding was. If you don’t like to share anything publicly, then you can use a video hosting service like Wistia or Vimeo that offers password protection features and gives you control over who can watch your videos.