Social media and web ideas for faith groups

People truly want to talk about their faith and communicate their blessings. Every weekend, some people update their status on Facebook and Twitter to say they are going to services and post reactions to homilies and discussions. Use your church’s website and social media platforms to host this discussion and encourage engagement.

SEO, website tasks, contact points

• Make reaching new people one of the primary tasks of your website. To be effective, your website needs to rank well in search engines for a wide variety of keywords. Try searching for your own church and topics related to your church. Note the alternate search terms and keywords that Google produces. Note the search terms that discover similar websites and social media pages. Improve the metadata on your website.
• To attract new people to your church your website should have some way for you to keep in touch with those visitors. A great way to do that is by having an email newsletter or a contact form for visitors. Make contact another primary task on your website.
• Make the share buttons to your social media platforms obvious and easy to find. Repeat share buttons on interior pages and on your contact page.

Educate your community with a blog

• Your ministry’s website or Facebook page can help you gain disciples. The website should have an active blog. Produce a series of blog posts to explain your faith, your faith’s organizational structure, your activities, services and outreach to curious people. Build good, solid content that identifies your ministry. This great organic content should brand yourself, your staff, your parishioners and your community in the posts.

Blend Social Media with your message

Social media is here to stay and the volume on channels like Facebook produce fields ripe for harvest. Some religious ministries are observed with a dose of skepticism by people in the community. Social media sites are primarily about building trust.

• Publish informative status posts about your ministry and what God is doing around you on a regular basis.
• Monitor for Spam and errant comments, but be real in your responses, share your personality, build trust in people that want to belong and want to see the real face behind the ministry.
• Ask others to answer questions on the Facebook Fan page. Allow people to help others
• Publish Facebook Notes. These can be short blog posts that you can tag with Facebook fans. You can also attach photos and style the text. Facebook Notes come up in search results (especially Bing) and you can also enable an RSS feed of this information.

Introduce your leaders and staff

• Your church website and social media sites can raise the profiles of your staff and leaders. Make a connection with a large group of followers. If your religious staff and lay people can produce a regular column to post on your church website, then more people will begin to know who they are. As they become more recognizable in your community, so then will your church.

Do you know of any other ways to improve communication for churches and ministries?

 

 

 

 

Facebook Fan page format change – surprise

New format Facebook Fan page for MrElshMedia

In the middle of my explanation to a friend as to why Facebook did not allow Fan pages to comment on other Fan pages – surprise, Facebook introduced its new Facebook fan page formats (Feb. 10).

You’ll find the Facebook Fan page design is almost identical to personal profiles now, and the ability of a Facebook Fan page administrator to comment as their Fan page on another Fan page is the key feature.

As today’s social tribes become much more interested in the filter of their trusted team members, family and friends, watch business websites optimize their social media delivery as much if not more than their search engine optimization.

Here’s the skinny on the changes:

Photo Showcase

Your most recent posted or tagged photos appear across the top. No fan photos – you control the summary.

Navigation – Stage Left

Info and tabs to the left, exactly like on personal profiles.

Two Fan Page wall filters

Show top Fan page wall posts or top posts from everyone. Set a default filter for your Wall via the Edit Page.

Interact as a Fan page

The best part is that you now have the flexibility to interact with other areas of Facebook as a page.

• You can view notifications when fans interact with Fan page posts
• See activity from the pages you like in your news feed
• Like other pages and feature them on your page
• Make comments as your page on other pages

See the new upgrade here at MrElshMedia. The upgrade is optional until March 1, when all Fan pages will convert to the new style according to Facebook.

Website content and the Soylent Green moment

Soylent Green moment: It's all made out of 'content.'

Websites are all about content. Whether your website contains widgets, video, audio, images, quizzes, animations, or infographics, it is the text post that contains the chewy, searchable goodness.

The moment when you realize that text content is the main ingredient – your Soylent Green moment – is when you must follow a playbook to help your readers get the most out of the content.

How to build a more efficient text post

• Scannable text (highlight keywords with color and typeface variations)
• Super sub-heads (not newspaper clever, no time to waste)
• Inverted pyramid (clever newspaper idea, begin with conclusion)
• One idea paragraphs (users will skip end of long paragraphs to next scannable item)
• Less is more (cut the word count in half – then cut again)
• Bulleted lists (like this one)

A brief well-constructed post provides an idea in text that is short enough that users will actually read it online. Detail and depth are layered with source material and links.

People are searching for the main ingredient in your text. Make it tasty.

3 social media jewels of past week

 

Eyecube's Periodic Table of the Social Media Elements

What’s handier than a Periodic Table of the Social Media Elements? 

Don’t get wrapped up in matching Noble Gases and Inert Elements to the social media staples and thought studs. Discover a very playful visualization of the ever expanding social media universe.

If you can judge a good idea by the enemies it creates (track the comments) then Eyecube is on to something.

What I know about SEO. Google and other big search engines constantly tweak the search algorithms. Check your Common Sense SEO Checklist from Chris Coyier. In the end, good honest information from a quality source will trump cheap tricks and black hat search engine optimization.

 

Focus on what you have control over.

 

A recent report “Social networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope,” prompts Brian Solis of FutureWorks to add visualizations of outbound and inbound networks using TwitterFriends.

 

As Twitter evolves and users experiment with different way to deliver information and value, and non-value (spammers), we look forward to updates on Solis’ network visualizations.