So your church has embraced social media. Terrific! That’s great news. You’ve opened your accounts, created a Facebook Page, and put a link to that and your Twitter feed on your website. Now just sit back and watch the results roll in. You’ll be converting people by the power of Facebook in no time.
Image: Well timed Dilbert from Church Crunch.
Social media is a great tool. Especially for ministry. Facebook lets you share pictures, videos, plan calendars and have conversations with all sorts of people – in front of their friends. Twitter lets people catch your every thought. And you can monitor what people are saying about your church online (if you’re savvy enough). You can also direct advertising at people in your community with particular interests, and even see what people in your area are tweeting about and all sorts of other cool stuff with the data and technology at your fingertips. Great. Steve Kryger at Communicate Jesus has been playing around with Facebook advertising for events lately.
But have you thought about anything past setting up the accounts and saying a few things here and there about how good your church is?
1. Be present… not an automated drone
Church Marketing Sucks posted a little survey they did today of churches that claim to be on Twitter but are really just running a shell presence on the site. They contacted a bunch of churches through Twitter, directly, and only four out of 36 churches they contacted replied. Which confirms my theory that churches aren’t really sure what to do with their social media presence, but rather that they have one for the sake of having one.
If you’re not using social media. Then don’t.
There’s no point doing any form of marketing or communications thing by half measures. If it’s not serving a purpose, if it’s not helping you achieve something deliberate – something you’ve set out to achieve in your strategic planning – then don’t do it. It’ll drain time, and it’ll look lame when a popular church marketing blog outs you as not actually caring.
The other thing that really annoys me is churches, or ministers, that/who pretend to be interested in participating in the web 2.0 conversation but then outsource their presence to an “admin” or a paid staff member, and if there’s one thing we can learn from the Australian Christian political party Family First, it’s that outsourcing your personal brand to your staff is dangerous. I get that you’re now running a mega-church and too busy to deal with your myriad fans and their legion requests for your attention – but don’t outsource being you to somebody else. That’s just lame.
2. Be real… not flawless
If there’s one thing I learned from the popularity of a post I wrote called “Mark Driscoll Ruined Facebook” it’s that posts about dodging a swooping bald eagle on the way to church get laughed at. By bloggers.
Seriously though…
3. Be yourself… not a church press release service
If I follow you on Twitter, as in you, the person. I want to read your thoughts and reflections. Not just hear about the great stuff your church is doing. If I wanted your church’s recent news I’d have looked for it on your website and subscribed to your RSS feed. You have one of them right? Have a look at your last ten tweets, or status updates, how many look like you’re talking on behalf of your organisation, not yourself?
I love reading encouraging ideas and pithy suggestions for Christian living on Twitter, I don’t mind the occasional reference to a great and relevant Bible verse. But if that’s all you offer… then you run the risk of creating the John Piper effect – a bunch of Christian followers who retweet your every word and annoy their friends. I want to get a feel for you, the person (and I imagine anybody curious about your church, or members of your church, feel the same), not for the Bible-zen person you want to present to the world.
4. Don’t blow your own trumpet… let others do it for you
I have lost count of how many friends I have on Facebook who are in ministry who have annoying status updates about how wonderful their church is. How encouraged they’ve been by x people etc… which is nice. Once in a while. But every week? Seriously. What about posting something about the trials and sufferings of ministry. The worst are the updates that read like a horribly arrogant Christmas letter – you know – the ones where you read about how wonderfully somebody else’s kid is going.
I get that you want people to think your church is excellent. But follow that Christmas letter analogy a little further – it’s much more convincing when somebody other than the kid’s parent tells you how amazing that kid is. It’s the same with your church, and your activities. Get a few social media ambassadors who use the medium well to commit to seeding Facebook and Twitter with positive messages about their experiences with your church a couple of times a month. Get other people to flog your upcoming events mercilessly. Ask people to do it in a sermon. Take a few keen young Twits aside. Come up with a #hashtag for your events and your regular stuff on Twitter. Get them tweeting your sermon highlights (if you want that), ask those you know who blog to blog about stuff to do with your church. Make your content easy to share on your website. Then step back.
5. Watch your signal to noise ratio… don’t clog the airwaves
Yeah. Your upcoming event is awesome. But I don’t need six invites, an email, and your Facebook status to tell me that. If I haven’t responded to your event invite and you think I should come – ring me. Social media isn’t the be all and end all of communication.
Twitter, Facebook, and the entire blogosphere (I know I contribute) is a cluttered environment. If you want your message to cut through, don’t annoy me by clogging up every place I turn, and don’t saturate each platform with the same stuff over and over again, or too much new stuff. Less is more. Encourage discussion on the same thread on Facebook if you want to keep it current in people’s newsfeed.
6. Be multimedia… don’t just use the text stuff
There’s an old urban legend about only using ten percent of the capacity of our brains. It’s not really true. But if all you’re doing is flooding the Internet with text you’re not doing it right. A picture says about 342 words. Not really a thousand.
7. Be winsome… not snarky or arrogant
Sarcasm doesn’t come across well in text form. Neither does snarky arguing. And if you say something that can be misinterpreted it probably will be. So don’t. Don’t say anything that is going to bring Jesus into disrepute. This probably means avoiding talking too much about issues that are going to cause your fanboys to leap at each other’s throats… and if it happens that your fanboys do take exception to something, handle it with grace and humour. Don’t be a heavy handed moderator who can’t take criticism. Don’t feed the trolls. Deal with people as people. Contact people in person, offline or in a personal message (depending on the circumstances) and have them make the resolution (if it occurs) public as part of the process. Apologise. Publicly. If you’ve done something wrong (unless you realise it way too late for it to be any good). Swallow your pride.
The whole point of being online is to win people to Jesus. Don’t forget that.
8. Forget about privacy… God isn’t the only one watching what you tweet
If there’s one thing we can learn from wikileaks it’s that data isn’t safe, and it’ll probably eventually be accessible to anybody who googles your name. Even google has a vast amount of information stored about you – what if, as Tim Challies asks in this piece, google made everything you’d ever searched or viewed through their search engine public? What if every comment, blog post, or tweet you’ve ever written came up at the tap of a keyboard? It’s more than possible that this will happen given the right hackers with the right amount of time, and the wrong intentions.
Challies quotes a Harvard Business Review article, which is where I’ll finish:
Thanks to Wikileaks, you can now expect that day to come when your most private and candid communications will appear for all to peruse. In preparation for that moment, you better make sure that your private dealings match your public declarations, if not perfectly then at least pretty close.
Your thoughts?
If you’re a ministry or social media thinker/professional and have more to contribute, or you’d like to disagree, please do so in the comments. I’d love to hear from you.
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Nathan,
Thanks for these thoughts: it’s always good to see Christians thinking this through and offering tips on how to do things better.
If you’re trying to improve digital communication, I’d be starting with email, not social media. I think the return on investment (time / money / expertise) is better, and the skills you learn will ultimately be transferable.
Jumping into a social media site is easy – too easy. It’s possible to put a lot of time into it, to feel the rewards of “always performing” in front of an audience, but not to see much improvement in the effectiveness of your ministry, nor even to redeem the time that you’ve spent on these sites.
Consider instead the time you spend on your existing communications – email newsletters, general back-and-forth. Can you improve your ability to communicate there – how much time would that save you?
Apologies for adding another topic to an already broad post.
Yeah, I agree. Email is really important as a communication tool. And it’s probably a necessary prior step.
I’d say, in a snap reaction to your comment, that so far as value for money goes online (and where I’d focus energy) it’d be:
a) a website people can find and navigate that provides relevant information.
b) good use of email for information distribution.
c) good presence on popular social media channels.
d) integration of a, b and c.
I think d is where I’m trying to hit at with this post. I think you want your email newsletters, ideally, to be seeding those social sites and directing people back to your website (and hopefully through your doors and into your community). I don’t think we should be losing site of the fact that we’re keen on real world relationships and ultimately a real relationship with God. All these endeavours should facilitate those better.
did you just add this image to an existing post?
John,
Yes I did. It seemed so apposite. It said almost everything I wanted the post to say a day after I wrote it.
Miley,
I’ll have to think about what I’d say about email past “be nice, don’t spam people, feature a good call to action, and keep it to the point. Oh, and don’t use it for pastoral stuff that you should be doing face-to-face or by phone.
I wonder how much your uni mob will grow out of their modes of communication and how much that represents the future.
Al,
Given that your Facebooking isn’t annoying and your blog hits a good mix of being you and ministry reflections I’d say you intuitively do it prettywll, though I suspect you’re not doing it for the purpose of marketing your church.
Helpful. I’m by no means good at social media stuff. Carrier pigeons are still a bit new for me.
But I can say that there are some ministries/churches/gospel workers who I am disinclined to feel warm towards because they fall foul of your points 2, 3 and 4. The Christmas letter analogy rings true as does this
“What about posting something about the trials and sufferings of ministry.”
Great list, Nathan. You know we’re pretty like-minded on this stuff.
I like Cafedave’s comment on email use. Perhaps you could post a follow up thing about how to best use email in ministry? I imagine you’d have some great stuff to say.
Sadly, in student ministry most of them don’t really use email and rely on text and FB messaging. Horrid. I will keep training them in the most excellent way…
@Nathe – all good stuff to say in a blog post I reckon. But there’s also stuff about how to use mailing lists and use email to communicate to the chuch as a whole.
wrt FB is the future. I hope not. I doubt it. Email is so much more powerful than FB messaging. FB would have to become an email client to compete, I reckon…
Mikey,
Yeah, although, in my experience mailing lists are something you need to train people to receive as well as to spend. I’d much rather a quick personal email that’s direct and to the point, or relational, than a mass email. I don’t read our church newsletters very often and I’m on staff. I don’t read many newsletters, I think (personally) you’re better off having a newsletter function as a subscription to the news section of your website – and update that frequently. And I’d do that as a blog – where people can also subscribe to an RSS feed.
I think creating content in one place and having it pulled strategically to different distribution channels is the way to go. So post everything to your website (and use WordPress or something similar as a CMS) – and have different categories go to different places – some get pulled through to Facebook news feeds on your fan page, others go to Twitter, photos get uploaded to Flickr and Facebook, and pulled through to the website… and newsletters pull content from your website. That’s how I’d set it up anyway. Because it makes maintaining a presence easier. Then you just pick and choose what audience you’re writing for as you post the stuff (to avoid falling foul of being an autonomous drone). And you make sure you’re also interacting appropriately in each forum.
Bit of a tangent from your point about mailing lists – which I appreciate. But email is only good if people are reading what you’re sending – and in my previous job we were sending weekly e-newsletters out to people who had opted in, and a monthly one to all our members, and our read rate was between 20 and 40%. So communicating to the “church as a whole” via one medium, other than up the front on a Sunday with 100% attendance, is a pipe dream. I reckon. But email has to be part of the picture. I think there’s probably some sort of schematic to assess the types of email people are likely to read.
For me it’s:
1. An email conversation that continues over many years with a few people that provides entertainment and is useful for thrashing out ideas (which can be replaced by Facebook).
2. Emails from a friend.
3. Direct and personal emails with clear subject lines and appropriate direct requests or calls to action (ie. An email that tells me what somebody wants and when they want it).
4. A regular and informative group email update that I have asked to receive that reflects my membership of something.
5. A group email/newsletter that I receive because I am part of a database.
6. Bacn – a newsletter I’ve subscribed to but no longer really care about that I may check if I’m really bored.
7. Spam – stuff I don’t want, about stuff I don’t care about.
I think too much church email traffic falls into categories 5-7, and we should be aiming for 1-3. 4 should be our starting point (or the “minimum required to tick the “email” box in a communication strategy”).
All of which shows that it’s worthy of its own post
A read-rate of 20-40% is pretty good and I doubt would be much better on FB.
I think there’s value in training people to use the most powerful, centralised channel and then using the others a bit as well. So I will keep working at teaching people to use email, while also seeking to use FB, Twitter and BulkSMS a bit.
Of course phone and face to face are more powerful still…
What I really like about this article is it’s clear and thought out and obvious.
Your thoughts on blocking up my inbox with invitations to carols services in Sydney when I live in North Queensland aren’t just annoying they are ridiculous. If you want to invite me – think about it, at least make it seem like it was personal??? I’m with you on telling everyone how great your church/church event is and how excited you are about it but please get a life!! Tell me something else every once in a while. (I realise I just did this about our carols night but I’d like to think I do that sparingly… maybe you could tell me otherwise.)
That’s what’s great about it.
What I don’t like about it is.
I can be snarky – I just returned fire on someone criticising an article I wrote on Pizza. Their comments were stupid but my reply wasn’t particularly kind or winsome either – and it wasn’t intended to be. I’m also particularly uncomfortable about the google search information being public!! Yikes. I’ve been googling all sorts of pregnancy related stuff lately for my wife that might require some explanation. I also think its a great point for a sermon somewhere.