by Mickey Mellen from Mt. Bethel Church of Marietta, GA. Follow him @mickmel.
Many churches and organizations are feeling like they should be on Twitter, but they’re not sure how they can use it for their cause. Here are a few techniques we’re trying at Mt. Bethel that may give you some ideas on how to get started:
- Showcase your staff: On your organization’s “staff” page, give clear links to those that are on Twitter. This is also a good place to link to their profiles on other social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Here’s ours as an example
- Summarize your staff tweets: Zappos does a great job of showing off their employee tweets. Kent Brewster has a script that can be plugged into almost any site to create a similar thing. To make it work, create a new twitter account and have it follow all of your staff members (and no one else). Plug that new twitter account into the script, and voila!
- Show live chats from events: A simple hash tag can go a long way. At a recent youth event, we enouraged people to use a hash tag when discussing the event, then we pointed parents to the Twitter search results page for that hash. It was very popular, but you run the risk of a bad apple saying some inappropriate things, and it can’t be cleaned up if you’re using this method.
- Find how who else related to your organization is on Twitter: If you have an e-mail database of your users/congregation, you can import that list to a new gmail account, then have Twitter search that account for active members. Follow them to see what’s going on, and many will follow you back.
- Tweet from retreats, events or mission trips: A great way to keep the people at home informed is a Twitter account dedicated to that event (like our current mission trip to Ecuador). The advantage to this over a hash tag is that parents and other concerned parties can subscribe to that user can get updates on their phone.
- Post weather-related news: If you have ongoing weather-sensitive events, such as outdoor sports, create an account dedicated to field conditions. Our recreation update account is often very quiet, but it’s worth gold on rainy Saturdays in the summer. It saves a LOT of phone calls from wondering parents.
- Post your blog entries: While the best Twitter interaction is personal, some users are losing interest in RSS feeds and just focusing on Twitter. Point your blog to a Twitter account as an alternative to RSS and e-mail subscriptions (blog to twitter). If you use WordPress, Twitter Tools is an excellent plug-in. If not, then twitterfeed can do the job.
- Always try new things: We created an account that uses sitetweet to post user activity (”user reading xx blog entry”, etc) to a dedicated twitter account. I personally find it a bit overwhelming, but some of the staff (and a few members) think it’s a neat thing to watch.
What other great ways have you found to use Twitter for your church/organization?
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@NateDesmond
Sounds great! The only one that I disagree with is the last point about RSS feeds. I do not think that RSS subscribers are loosing interest. Where did you get those stats?
Thanks,
Nate
@mickmel
Nate — the RSS info is purely anecdotal. I agree that not many are losing interest, but a few are and it literally takes about five minutes to create a new Twitter account and point your blog to it. If it’s helpful for 1000 users, that’s great. If it’s helpful for five, it was still worthwhile.
Plus, you might pick up a few other random followers. We’ve received a little bit of extra traffic from that account. Not much, but certainly enough has trickled in over the last few months to justify the few minutes it took to set it up.
@timmyjohnboy
I’ve considered talking the youth department into using twitter to keep teens and parents abreast about activities coming and current changes to the calendar. We would have a specific Twitter account (ie. @fbcyouthupdates or similar).
In the past we’ve attempted letting them subscribe to email updates to a wordpress site but I’ve had trouble with participation. Perhaps twitter would be easier for the non-tech members. We could even tie it to a Facebook page (many are on facebook already)
Any thoughts?
@nicolebaker
This is such a great idea!
@heytoepfer
Last week, Trinity Wall Street tweeted the Passion Narrative which some people found very effective. Though it wasn’t really to my taste, I thought it was a creative form of the medium and it got a lot of press as well.
@mickmel
Tim — It can be tough to get parents on board. The key is to give them a GOOD reason to take the time to start following, then you can use it for other things.
Two examples:
– Our main church blog had about slowly grown over the last 18 months to about 55 subscribers. We took our annual “Lenten devotionals” and made them web-only this year. We posted them on our blog each day, but gave people detailed info on how to subscribe via e-mail. We’re now running a little over 400 subscribers on the blog, and most will probably stay on even though the devotions are finished.
– As neat as I think our Twitter-based recreation updates are, we still only have about 30 people following it. Most just visit the site to see. However, our mission trip to Ecuador got about 45 followers overnight, mostly from concerned parents. Many of these parents are not tech-savvy, but they took the time to learn so they could keep up with their kids.
The cool thing with Twitter is that parents can subscribe without even creating an account — just text “follow fbcyouthupdates” to 40404 and they’re done.
We’ve got a wide variety of Facebook pages as well, with varying degrees of success. I think FriendFeed may ultimately be the best answer because you can roll everything into one. In our case, it pulls in our Twitter accounts, both blogs, all three podcasts, SmugMug uploads and new YouTube videos — all on one page! The userbase is still too small to get too excited about, but it’s got a lot of potential.
@billhutchison
Thanks for the great advise.
We have been looking at how to better use Twitter to get the message out about what’s happening with our non-profit organization around the globe, and these are some great tips.
As far as RSS readers loosing interest, I know that how I use my RSS reader has changed a lot since I have started to use Twitter more. I don’t spend nearly as much time there as I used to.
@timmyjohnboy
Interesting statement: “The key is to give them a GOOD reason to take the time to start following” because I’ve noticed more and more parents and adults in general opening Facebook accounts and I can’t help but assume it is to stay on top of what the kids are doing on there. I figured using a youth group account could make a good addition to what they can follow.
I love the idea of using Twitter for Missions trips, etc. My father-in-law, as a missionary in Haiti, has just started a blog and I wonder if a Twitter account could be a good addition.
What’s funny about this post is that I was just pondering some of these uses and whether not it was being done already. Thanks for the good advice and insights!
@mickmel
Tim — Be careful not to create a youth group “account”, but rather a page or a group. I’ve seen churches create user accounts for the church, which are later deleted by Facebook (against the TOS).
We’ve toyed with Facebook for a while, but about a year ago I really dug in. I found that church members had created about 40 church-related groups on their own — small groups, youth-related, choirs, etc. We’ve obviously being a lot more intentional on there now, but I was amazed how much they were doing on their own.
They key from there is figuring out how best to use those groups to relay information. We’re still playing with some ideas there, and we haven’t quite figured it out yet.
@timmyjohnboy
Mickey – I would prob choose a page and make it the “authorized” youth group page so the leaders have control over it. I haven’t studied it out but I’m hoping facebook allows moderation.
My thought was to offer several options for receiving updates and information so people can choose what they are most comfortable with (blog, twitter, facebook, RSS, etc. I’ll have to look into FriendFeed). Phones and fliers are still quite popular in churches.
@mickmel
Tim — that’s exactly what we’ve done. “official” pages on the site, and yes, there are some nice moderation tools you can use.
I’m of the same opinion — offer as many tools as possible to make it easy for people to get the info, including fliers and phones.
@waltpsu
Why blur the names out in the first image if you’re going to link to the page?
@mickmel
I thought about that later, too. Oh well.
@ScottWilliams
We use Twitter as a tool on our internet campus… its a button that allows you to Twitter an invite to your followers. http://www.LifeChurch.tv
@askdebra
I recently heard of a Jewish Federation trip from the US to Israel dedicating a #hashtag for the trip so that everyone in the US could follow the trip on twitter. I thought that was a great us of Twitter to engage, recruit and inform. Additionally, I think you missed the biggest Twitter use opportunity: to crowdsource new ideas about programming, collaborations, and any new systems that nonprofits are interested in creating, or have recently implemented.
Twitter (like Facebook) can be a security risk, as it has suffered a rash of viruses of late. For some users and terminals within a church, it may be prudent to block Twitter. -Ben
@Mi_Integrity
Thanks for the summary of ministry uses for Twitter Mickey. I encourage churches to experiment with Twitter all the time. The time has come for churches to creatively integrate this very useful technology into their community activities. It excites me to see all the ways your church has done this! I am going on a missions trip in early 2010 and using Twitter there will be brilliant!
@mickmel
Tim and David — A word of caution about using Twitter on a mission trip; getting tweets to go through reliably can be a problem. Our Kenya team last year was never able to get any to go out, though we didn’t troubleshoot much. Our recent Ecuador trip had some glitches early on (first two tweets evaporated), but the rest came through without a problem. Not sure what happened.
To combat it, I had them copy me on every text (”To: 40404, mickey”) so I know when they tweeted. I’d then check the site to make sure it went through. If one failed, I could just post it manually. It was kind of a pain, but it’s worth doing for a trip every now and then to make sure it goes smoothly.
@phillipgibb
very interesting,
actually this is something that can be used in many other situations,
like in a blog with a number of contributing authors.
going to try that instead a small list in the sidebar.
@anthonycoppedge
Love it. Great ideas. I’m linking to this on my blog over at http://twitterforchurches.com/blog
Good discussion, too!
@hectorhenry17
what else we will see in twitter guerrillas. just guessing
good post
@sitetweet
For your first tip – Showcase your staff – you should create a custom Twitter aggregator with http://isontwitter.com
BTW – Thanks for the sitetweet mention
@mickmel
One other simple Twitter account we just created:
http://twitter.com/mbblogcomments
This is for any new comments in either of our blogs. WordPress has RSS feeds for comments, so I simply pointed those comment feeds at this Twitter account using TwitterFeed, and we can just follow that account to see any new comments that come in. I pre-moderate all comments on the blog anyhow (so I already know what’s there), but for the rest of the staff it’s another way to keep them connected with what’s going on in the blogs.
@mickmel
Phillip — isontwitter.com is kinda neat, but doesn’t handle the staff showcasing as well as I’d like. A few problems:
1 — It lists users on the side, but doesn’t combine all tweets into one stream.
2 — You can’t embed it on your site; you have to link to theirs.
If I’m mistaken about either of those, please let me know. If not, then I think Ken Brewster’s script remains a better solution.
I think feel like there’s probably something a little more slick and intuitive out there, but I haven’t found it…
Thanks for sharing. I’ll certainly pass this onto the church that I go to.
@sitetweet
Hello Mickey – thanks for the reply. About your points:
1) you can do this with isontwitter.com: simply create a twitter account with the users you want to place in one stream and then include this as a menu item within isontwitter (check out the “sitetweet employees ” on http://mybusiness.isontwitter.com/sitetweet )
2) that’s true – being able to widgitize this information can be very valuable.
I am going to study the other suggestion you placed.
Cheers.
@isontwtr
Mickey – loved your idea of a widget, and now allowed users to create these company / group pages and use a widget to maintain people on the site.
check it out at: http://sitetweet.net/isontwitter and let me know your thoughts!
@amyshropshire
I love that more and more nonprofits are looking into using Twitter and other social networking platforms. I’ve run into a lot of apprehension among my clients and I’m always on the lookout for good examples of it in action to show them! Thanks!