Ask anyone who knows me and they will tell you that I’m not a fan of social media. Technology, yes. But not social media. So it might surprise you to learn that one of my roles on staff at First Trinity is to manage our social media efforts. Thankfully, social media is a skill that can be learned and done well with the proper planning and systems.
If I can learn it, so can you.
Here are some resources that I’ve produced about social media in light of what we do at First Trinity, plus other resources that I have found helpful in developing my own strategies and practices around using social media in a church.
Posts By Me
Church Social Media: The Big Picture
Here I look at a few of the different options and platforms that are available. We cover blogs (WordPress, Google Blogger), social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Google+), and video sharing (YouTube, Vimeo). This is a good place to start for some of the strengths and weaknesses of the various categories, not necessarily in-depth looks at a particular service.
Strategic Social Media For Your Church
Learn how to take control of social media and use it to enhance your church’s ministry efforts. There are questions to consider as you develop a strategy for social media, tips for building a team and the value of planning content.
Updating Social Media with Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a tool that allows you to manage multiple social media accounts through a single interface. To take full advantage of their bulk uploading and scheduling service, I developed an Excel spreadsheet to make the process a little bit simpler. You can download the upload tool from this post, as well as a list of 120 daily Bible verses that we use at First Trinity on our Facebook wall.
Social Media Tips For Churches (and Others)
This is a collection of tips that I found either through discovery or from others online, along with a short explanation of each of the tips.
Getting Your Church Started on Facebook
One of my earlier posts about our decision to get started on Facebook. We’ve grown quite a bit since then, but it’s still an interesting read. Much of the information in this post has been expanded upon by the posts above.
Other Resources
The Blogging Church by Brian Bailey
This is the book that got me started on my blogging adventure. Much like the social media seminar we attended from Waterbrook Multnomah, this book helped me understand the basic structure and strategy behind a blog. It’s from 2007, the early days of blogging, but still a helpful resource.
Waterbrook Multnomah’s Social Media for Churches
Another resource that is showing it’s age, this social media primer from Christian publisher Waterbrook Mulnomah was super helpful in providing a basic framework for social media. The specifics about Facebook have changed with the shift from the old view to Timeline, but the concepts and strategies are still helpful.
Top Nonprofits
This is the website for the guy that produced the social media planning guide in the Strategic Social Media For Churches article I wrote above. He has some other helpful resources and lists of organizations doing social media well.