By now, you’ve probably heard all about Twitter, the very popular micro-blogging service. If not, here is a short video explaining it:
At our church, we struggled for a while to find a good way to use this to help reach our congregation, but we’re finally starting to use it effectively. We’ve come up with a few good uses for it so far:
- http://twitter.com/mtbethelumc — This is essentially just a feed from our blog, using the WordPress plug-in called Twitter Tools. We plan to expand it to cover more topics, but it’s just a blog feed for now.
- http://twitter.com/mtbethelmusic — Our Senior High Choir Tour is currently in progress, and they’re using Twitter to keep the congregation (especially their parents!) informed about the trip. We’ve done this with other trips, with decent success.
- http://twitter.com/mtbethelrec — We have a very active recreation ministry, and this is updated if conditions on our field are bad, so parents know whether games have been canceled or not. It’s very useful for the parent on the go to get a text message with the info, rather than having to pull up the website or call the church office. We also push this Twitter feed to our main website and our mobile website, using a free script called Twitter2HTML.
Other churches are starting to get on board. Oak Leaf Church has just launched a Twitter feed. There’s not much there yet, but they plan on adding things such as important announcements, prayer requests, etc.
The great thing about Twitter is that it works for users of any skill level. If you just want updates, click the link and read them. Want an RSS feed? Subscribe. Have your own Twitter account? Follow ours. Want to stay even more informed? Follow ours and enable text messaging.
All of this Twittering leads to a growing problem: fragmentation. Using our church as an example, we have a YouTube account, a SmugMug account, a blog, three podcasts and five twitter accounts. How to keep up? Enter FriendFeed.
FriendFeed is a quickly growing service that helps pull together all of your various feeds. We have a FriendFeed account that pulls all 11 of those feeds onto one page. I have a page of my own that pulls information from 14 sources. We haven’t started promoting it for the church very much yet, but I’m making sure our account is as connected as possible, because the service is growing very quickly.
How does your church use Twitter? Have you started working with FriendFeed yet? Or any other similar services?
Good post.