The question this week was posed, how should the church use twitter.
I may not be popular with this statement and you don’t have to agree, but I don’t think it really should. So here are some thoughts on that.
Twitter uses 140 characters to hold a quick personal global conversation through sharing stories. Churches cannot tell a story in 140 characters (and if you’re tweeting multiple tweets to get a point across, send an email or write a blog instead).
It is all about brevity and conciseness.
Persons within the church can use twitter all day, communicate, tell stories, connect with people on a personal level. Entities on twitter or most social networking platforms are impersonal, cold, and most times obnoxious. Links to awkward videos are fine from friends because I can actually reach out and smack them later. I can’t do that to the church.
The best representation I have for this are companies like AT&T and Comcast who are putting real people behind twitter accounts linked to their customer service and are relating well to people. These people are dealing with problems and bridging relationships with companies. Churches really don’t have the opportunity to deal with problems on twitter in a public venue, unless you want to hear about uncle Henry’s divorce, or Johnny’s drug addiction, which is not exactly appropriate.
So what do churches do wrong on twitter.
They share too much, whether meaningful information or absolute junk (most falls into this category)
They share too little, some entities haven’t tweeted in 153 days…thats engaging….
They share only self promotion items, too much look at me and self pats on the back.
They promote every single thing that shows up on their calendar, I don’t care when Martha May’s birthday party is.
They don’t promote ANYTHING that the church is doing, which should be a primary use of this short burst medium.
What do some churches do well on twitter?
They share short meaningful stories on twitter to encourage community.
They share meaningful promotional items on a regular basis (scheduled out so not to be obnoxiously frequent), important time changes, cancelations etc.
They share short exciting stories about how the church is impacting the community or the world.
How does the church engage on twitter?
Use one concise voice for your social platform whether twitter, Facebook or some other site. And if it’s all of the above, assign a singular person this task to update so it all sounds the same. Create a unified strategy, usually spear-headed by whoever handles your PR .
Share information that is relevant to your group. Aka don’t post forwarded email junk, footprints in the sand, random you-tube posts (unless its a youth site…then maybe). Post great pictures from the recent fall festival you had on Facebook and cultivate conversations around those. Tell people your service times changed through twitter!
Use unique hash tags to create conversations about your church, your message series, your event. This bypasses the necessity for a church wide twitter account all together. Use a few strategic church staff members to cultivate these conversations, promote the use of the hash tags from stage, signage or print material.
Remember that twitter is still considered a fringe social media platform and it’s hitting a very small section of your congregation. Yes it’s growing, but it’s still not to the Facebook status, and google plus (that isn’t going any where fast). Many of these principles can be applied to Facebook too, but dont expect a large group of your ministry to be active on fringe social platforms unless they’re nerds or early adopters.
Be careful when adopting social media. It is a personal story and conversation medium, not a mail chimp blast medium.
I agree that maybe “churches” shouldn’t use Twitter, certainly not without a strategy for using what is, after all, only a tool. But individuals? I’ve seen how individuals within a church community can use it to build community, share prayer, and be Christ to one another. This has certainly been my experience over the 3+ years on Twitter and I thank technology and God!
Thanks for the comment Meredith, didn’t mean it to sound like individuals in the church shouldn’t use twitter, I think that is the biggest way to create conversations on twitter! I also don’t think that every church does a botch job of using social media, but I think it is something that then entity needs to have a unified plan and voice going out on these platforms, and then use individuals in the church as catalyst for conversations, like companies have started doing for customers service.