This is part 2 of my social media strategy for churches. Yesterday, I laid out the game plan. Today I am sharing about how to go about accomplishing the plan using social media.
How do we build the community?
- Keep it simple. Community takes time to build. It develops the same way as in person.
- Share and give away all that we have using the social media tools available.
- Interact with the community that develops and build relationships.
Content – This is only scratching the surface.
- Content is anything we can share on line.
- Stories – VCC is full of stories. We don’t have time in church to share them all. Tell the world how God is moving in and through the people of VCC.
- Video – Post all of our videos that were created for services and let people watch them. Create VCC missional videos directed at our on line community. Create trailers for each church series and share them. Show highlight reels from events at VCC.
- Teaching – This could be curriculum to use for small groups, sermon notes and questions. It could be tips on how we run our ministries. We can share successes and failures of things we have tried. It could be a way to take the weekend message beyond the weekend.
- Pictures – Tools such as Flickr can be utilized to create photo sets where other Flickr users can upload photos. You could have a collection of photos from the community while serving or participating in something like SOS.
- Outreach – Use the blog, Twitter, and Facebook to advertise outreaches in order to coordinate volunteers and encourage people to participate.
- Events – Advertise and coordinate. Think viral campaign.
- Give Aways – Use the blog to give away free stuff. Ask for comments and pick random winners.
- Missions – Share updates on missions that VCC is a part of.
How Do We Measure It?
- Statistics – We can keep detailed statistics about the web traffic showing how many hits, unique visitors, how long they spend on the site, where they are located, and much more.
- Stories – Just like small groups can measure their success by the number of stories they have, you can measure social media success by how many stories are out there about VCC.
What does a WIN look like?
- Stories – When stories on the Internet are spreading about VCC and we are not the ones talking.
- Community – More people plugging into community who were not before.
Action Steps
- Build the blog and start developing and collecting content.
- Connect the blog with Facebook and Twitter and commit to interacting through them.
- Make a connection with current VCC members who are actively using social media and link to them and endorse the community. Ask people to share and endorse VCC.
- Begin monitoring and listening to social media for mentions of VCC and respond.
- Begin advertising for virtual small groups.
- Be diligent, follow through, and have patience.
- Figure out what we can do different from everyone else.
Potential
- Build blogs for individual ministries at VCC if enough content available.
- Convert the church website into blog format and simplify.
- Live Streaming church services on the Internet.
- Building networks with other churches and sharing ideas and resources.
- Using technology to train and encourage leaders.
- Develop a whole network of small groups on line beyond Cincinnati.
Return on Investment
ROI is very high. Most of the tools are free. The key to making social media work for this community is quality content and interaction that is quick and helpful.
