Our church has been experimenting with Twitter (I’m @mickmel) for the last year or so, but we haven’t made any hard pushes toward using it. Anthony Coppedge has just put out an e-book called The Reason Your Church Must Twitter, and now we might be getting somewhere. Since I got the book, I’ve been talking with various pastors at our church and we’re coming up with some good ideas. I’ll be sharing some of those in a future post.
The e-book is excellent. It’s only $5 and is well worth it. I have no financial interest in you getting the book — I simply think it’s something that every church needs to look at and consider.
Does your church already Twitter? If so, what kind of cool stuff have you been doing with it?
Thanks for picking up the e-book. Love to hear the ideas y’all are coming up with. Share on the blog over at http://twitterforchurches.com/blog and let us know; your ideas may end up in the next version update (1.01 just updated today).
Not really Twittering yet, but I did sign up to create an account. I don’t really understand why people are so into Twittering though. I guess I don’t feel a need to tell people what I am doing every minute of the day…
Adam — You simply need to find other people to follow. If people answered “what are you doing” with things like “eating a sandwich” and “using the restroom”, I’d agree with you. However, I follow people that say things that interesting me (for the most part). Here are a few recent tweets I’ve seen stream by:
– “Watching: Secret to Maximum Blog Income and Conversion (Video) http://bit.ly/kOoi4”
– “Please Support Team Affiliate Marketers Give Back (Fighting Breast Cancer) – http://is.gd/1kTVx”
– “New Google Earth Featured Modeler announced on our blog: John from Dursley, England. Read post here http://bit.ly/camnk”
– “Update: Evernote Web gets Autosave: http://bit.ly/19ijjy”
All are things that interest me. You follow those that interest you, and stop following them if you don’t like (or care) what they’re talking about. Roughly 10% of our church membership uses Twitter. It’s far lower than LinkedIn or Facebook, but it’s still certainly enough to pay attention to.
– “Reading such-and-such book to strengthen my faith”.
– “Working on changing our title tags to get ranked higher in Google”.
– “Just updated our site with video sermons. What do you think?”
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Adam,
We have begun Twittering to accomplish 2 main goals:
1. Advertize our church’s ministry to those on Twitter. We tweet announcements about what is going on and sometimes even live during services. We are following several other churches that are ahead of us with Twitter and are learning from them as we go.
2. Communicate with our members. We’d like to use it as a primary means of communication at some point due to the fact that you can have updates sent to your cell phone via SMS. At present our following is small compared to the size of our congregation. And we are an older church. But I believe we are investing in the future. I also like to use the live tweeting to keep those who are not present connected to the ministry while they are away.
I debated for months about using Twitter, then just decided to get started. It has proven popular with the 20 to 40 year old crowd so far.
Mickey and Anthony have been great assets to getting us started (without knowing it!).
we just started twitter and it’s amazing how people often people use it. we just started using one recently
Have been twittering a bit, and have reach a few people. I will continue to see how God uses Twitter to reach out for spreading The Gospel to people.