I purchased a pair of Air Jordan basketball shoes in seventh grade in preparation for heading back to school. I loved putting my old pair of shoes in the new shoe box, and walking out of the store in my new shoes, ready to show them off to my friends on the first day.
Perhaps you have a website that has not been touched in two (or three) years. Or a Facebook group with 800 students who have already graduated. Let me offer five quick tune ups that will feel the same as putting those old shoes in the box and walking out with new ones.
1. Maximize a Facebook Page: It’s tempting to use a Facebook group to as your primary Facebook communication channel, but a Facebook Page will give you the best results over time.
A Group can easily become ignored or tuned out due to its potential to come across as spam to the members. Each time something is posted in a Facebook group, each member receives a notification in Facebook, as well as an email. Even sending out just two messages a week can quickly turn into information overload for your members.
A Page does not include notifications, so a member has to either visit the page directly or view updates in their news feed. At first this lack of visibility seems like a disadvantage, but it forces those updating the page to make their updates inviting, engaging, relevant, and timely. Instead of posting the same old text-only message announcing an event, upload a photo of something related to the event (such as a BBQ grill for a cookout), ask people to “like” the update if they like BBQ, and then in the comment section include the relevant information related to the event.
A Page also offers a personalized url (facebook.com/yourministryname), detailed demographic information about your members, as well as information about each post that you share (how many times it was seen by your members, and the percentage of members who like or comment. It includes the ability to embed your page on a website, which not only helps increase the amount of people who join the page but also makes your website look more updated since it shows the most recent updates from the page’s wall as well as a sample of pictures of people who have liked the page.
2. Add a mobile plugin to your blog: Over 40% of Google searches now happen on a mobile device. I can only imagine this percentage will increase.
If you use WordPress to power your ministry website then you can easily install a plugin that will do the work of formatting your site for a mobile browser for you. Click here to see a list of 10 Free Mobile Plugins to use for your site.
If you are looking to upgrade the theme of your WordPress-based site then consider using Whiteboard, a free theme that is optimized for mobile right out of the box. It’s a spartan theme, but with so many sites having too much information, a site that has lots of white space can be a welcome sight.
3. Buy an iPod Touch: There is no better device to capture video and photos for your ministry.
You or your students may have an iPhone or Android device, but purchasing an iPod Touch for your entire ministry to share will provide a centralized tool that will not only capture but easily store and share photos and videos.
You can connect your ministry’s YouTube channel to the device, so that any videos can be published to the channel with one tap of your finger. If your ministry uses Flickr you can easily upload pictures with the Flickr app.
During a meeting or event you can ask a couple of students to take pictures and upload them directly to Facebook. Then afterwards go back in and encourage people to tag their friends. This is a great way to increase engagement and interaction on your Facebook page. The added bonus is that these photos are saved on your ministry’s device in case you need them for something else down the road. Instead of a boring text-based announcement, use the iPod Touch to shoot a quick video instead.
4. Fill Up Your YouTube Channel: “As of February 2011, YouTube has 490 million unique users worldwide per month, who rack up an estimated 92 billion page views each month. We spend around 2.9 billion hours on YouTube in a month — over 325,000 years.”–source
A YouTube channel is similar to a Facebook Page–it offers a customized url (youtube.com/yourministry), customization options, and most importantly is not connected to a specific person. A channel offers a centralized and customized place for your ministry videos to be shared.
A few different kinds of videos to try: testimonies, skits, announcements, worship (record one song each week), as well as people hanging out or having fun at an event.
5. Empower students to message other students: 67% of consumer purchase decisions primarily influenced by word of mouth (#1 factor)–source
I used to send out a weekly email and Facebook message to everyone involved in my ministry with the week’s announcements and an invitation to come to the weekly meeting we hosted on campus. At one point during a semester I became busy and did not send out a weekly update for four weeks. As an experiment I stopped sending out messages for the semester–attendance at all of our events stayed the same as the year before. I realized that most students decide to attend events based on how many of their friends are attending.
Ask your student leaders to take turns or share the load of messaging your ministry. Depending on your size, have a few send out text messages a few hours before a particular event is set to start. Or have them send Facebook messages to a small number of students (the maximum Facebook allows is 17 for a personal message). This will take more coordination but the results will be well worth it.
Hope this helps as you prepare for trust God for another exciting year of ministry!
[ BACK-TO-SCHOOL BLOGATHON HOMEPAGE ]
6 thoughts on “5 Ways to Tune Up Your Social Media Strategy Before School Starts”
This is great, Brian, as always.
A couple of thoughts / questions:
1) I think at least a portion of the WordPress free-hosted sites (WordPress.com, instead of WordPress.org) automatically have the mobile optimization plug-in. It’s an option (you can turn it off), but I think the default is ON. There may be a lot of ministries that have gone the free blog route, and they should be set – at least depending on the theme.
2) Any thoughts on college ministry sites that use Flash? With the prevalence of iPhones / iPads (that can’t use Flash) and Adobe’s moves to go past Flash this week… is it better for a college ministry web site to be “pretty” or to be mobile? Other thoughts on that?
hey benson!
good to know re the free WP sites.
as you may have guessed i’m not a big fan of flash–not just for iPhones/iPads but because search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo cannot index flash-based content.
new students, parents, and prospective students are three of the most frequent visitors to a ministry website–current students most likely get their information from their friends or from facebook.
many of those mentioned above may not know the url of your ministry website and go to a search engine and type in a semi-specific phrase such as “ucla campus crusade”–if a site has a lot of flash then it has few words that a search engine can match with phrases such as these.
if you have a blog based website then chances are you have more words, phrases and links that search engines can use to help match these vague phrases to a specific link to your ministry website.
at chico state we actually connected a non-believer in this fashion–he typed in “chico state bible studies” and one of our pages had those words in it–he left a comment asking for more info, we invited him to a meeting, and he ended up attending and actually hearing the Gospel from two of our student leaders a few weeks later.
Great Article Brian!
thanks jim!
Comments are closed.