Twitter for Churches
As I’ve done with Facebook and will do with Google+, I’ve broken down this analysis into three categories: advertising, personal connection, and discussion tools. Twitter thrives at the first, being significantly better than either of the other two social networks, but is very weak for the latter two. As with the other two, it is important to know the strengths and weaknesses of each as you develop a social networking strategy.
Advertising
When used well, Twitter is a very powerful tool for advertising. The reason for this is simple: the short bursts of information, which are the basis of Twitter, are quickly spread and quickly passed on to others. Twitter is built on followers – not friends or connections as on other social tools. These followers will likely not see nearly all of your tweets (depending on the usage pattern of the follower) as Twitter is filled with a lot of bite-sized information. On the one hand, it is easy for your church’s tweets to be lost within a sea of other tweets. On the other hand, though, there is a lot of potential for those bits of information to spread really quickly, especially with the power of the “Re-Tweet.” This is exactly what it sounds like: somebody following you can quickly share your tweet to their followers with the click of a button. Spreading information through these re-tweets is typically how you expand your follower base, although “trending topics” is another great way.
Facebook and the Church
Keeping Track of Parishioners
As I covered in my post introducing the basics of the three major social networks, Facebook has earned the right to be referred to as “THE social network”. At over 800 million people and being the most personal-profile-centric, its main value is in personal connection – for churches, this primarily means for keeping in touch with parishioners.
The Big 3 of Social Networking: Facebook, Twitter, and Google+
Social networking is an inevitable part of the world we live in, and in many ways the church has not learned to make use of this part of our lives nearly as effectively as society as a whole. This post begins a series of articles on how the church can use social networking to enhance their ministry. First up, we’ll take a look at some of the basic advantages and disadvantages of the current 3 major social networks: Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
