A wonderful discussion was started over at TwiTip, an excellent Twitter resource site. This is a main-stream site and they’re talking about using Twitter for churches! Love it!

Here’s a few of the ideas they tossed out for discussion. Be sure to read the entire post:

• Showcase your staff: On your organization’s “staff” page, give clear links to those that are on Twitter. This is also a good place to link to their profiles on other social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Here’s ours as an example
• Summarize your staff tweets: Zappos does a great job of showing off their employee tweets. Kent Brewster has a script that can be plugged into almost any site to create a similar thing. To make it work, create a new twitter account and have it follow all of your staff members (and no one else). Plug that new twitter account into the script, and voila!
• Show live chats from events: A simple hash tag can go a long way. At a recent youth event, we enouraged people to use a hash tag when discussing the event, then we pointed parents to the Twitter search results page for that hash. It was very popular, but you run the risk of a bad apple saying some inappropriate things, and it can’t be cleaned up if you’re using this method.
• Tweet from retreats, events or mission trips: A great way to keep the people at home informed is a Twitter account dedicated to that event (like our current mission trip to Ecuador). The advantage to this over a hash tag is that parents and other concerned parties can subscribe to that user can get updates on their phone.
• Post weather-related news: If you have ongoing weather-sensitive events, such as outdoor sports, create an account dedicated to field conditions. Our recreation update account is often very quiet, but it’s worth gold on rainy Saturdays in the summer. It saves a LOT of phone calls from wondering parents.
  
• Post your blog entries: While the best Twitter interaction is personal, some users are losing interest in RSS feeds and just focusing on Twitter. Point your blog to a Twitter account as an alternative to RSS and e-mail subscriptions (blog to twitter). If you use WordPress, Twitter Tools is an excellent plug-in. If not, then twitterfeed can do the job.