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Posts Tagged ‘church’

Free Easter Viral Marketing For Your Church

Saturday, March 28th, 2009

Lots of churches will use mailers, door hangers and even phone trees (auto phone dialers with a pre-recorded message) to spread the word about their upcoming special Easter services.

But what if your church could reach thousands of people for free and nearly instantly? That’s the power of not only your network (church members), but of their network of family, friends, neighbors and co-workers!

social-graphAs the illustration on the left demonstrates, the exponential power of social networking isn’t how many people your church invites, but in how many people those friends invite from their network, and then how many people from that group invite friends from their network, and so on and so on.

For this Easter, or for any event where your church needs to maximize the power of social networks, think of how to leverage a simple, free and existing technology, like Twitter, to easily reach not only more people, but people with a personal connection to your church.

It’s more personal, more targeted, faster and free. That’s the power of a free viral marketing campaign using social networking for your church!

To learn how to use Twitter most effectively, make sure your church leaders have a copy of the $5 E-book, “The Reason Your Church Must Twitter”.

Twitter Webinar with WFX

Wednesday, March 11th, 2009

Thanks to everyone for joining the webinar I taught for WFX on using Twitter and social media for churches. We had over 800 registered and 518 unique log-ins (with several people sharing connections) during the hour-long WebEx session.

I want to apologize for the microphone issue for the first 12 minutes. I had no way to monitor how I sounded and didn’t realize the problem’s cause until the moderator, Carol, helped sort it out. The entire webinar was recorded, so if you can turn up your speakers a bit and listen carefully for those initial few minutes, it does clear up and is very easy to understand after I fixed it.

In fact, to watch and hear the webinar, simply click this link: http://budurl.com/TwitterWebinar

I answered as many questions during the Q&A as we had time, but I’m more than happy to answer any questions that we didn’t have time to answer during the webinar. Feel free to post your questions in the comments below or send me a question to either @churchtechie or @anthonycoppedge on Twitter.

Thank you again for learning alongside me as we leverage technology & communications to effectively communicate the Gospel of Jesus!

Twitter – Perfect for Daylight Savings Time

Saturday, March 7th, 2009

Using Twitter as a Megaphone to reach a large and/or specific group of people in real-time on their cell phones is one of the most valuable aspects of Twitter. Churches often have a need to send announcements, reminders and last-minute updates to a large group of people.

Phone calls are usually impractical (even with a phone tree).

Emails may not be read in time (or in days!)

But instant text messaging to cell phones is the most likely and fastest way to reach the most people.

And here’s where today is a perfect example. If your church is using Twitter to update your entire church body from your main church Twitter account (each ministry should also have accounts for specific information as well) then you’ll be able to send a reminder late this afternoon to all of your church members about setting their clocks forward one hour so they’re not an hour late to church on Sunday!

Such a simple and effective use of Twitter for churches!

Social Networking’s Growth & Reach

Thursday, February 26th, 2009

I’ve had several church pastors, communications directors and media staff ask me for some kind of statistical data to help them (and their church leadership) understand the impact, growth & importance of social networking in our culture (specifically, the United States). I continue to find bits and pieces of data in stories and news items, but today I found some very interesting information which provides a bunch of highly useful data for explaining the fast adoption rate of social networking.

The following data comes from an article by the Center for Media Research (at Mediapost.com). You can subscribe to their daily newsletters for free if you are also interested in this kind of data.

A Netpop study found that social networking has grown 93% since 2006 and 76% of US broadband users (105 million) are active contributors to the web via social media. In addition, approximately 29%, or 40 million broadband users, are regular contributors to the web specifically through social networking sites and are spending increasing amounts of their online time communicating with each other, both one-to-one and one-to-many.

In looking at the social network landscape, Netpop offers these Key findings about US social networkers:

  • Social networkers in the US are most likely to be single, employed women, age 18-39 and living somewhere between Indiana and the Atlantic Ocean, or along the west coast.
  • A typical social networker connects weekly with an average of 18 people one-to-one, and 110 people one-to-many.
  • Social networkers spend an average of 36% of their online time talking and sharing.
  • Social networkers use multiple modes to communicate and stay in touch. These include IM (Instant Messages), texts, blogs and microblogs (such as Twitter).

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