So What Faith

Greg Smith

Leveraging Facebook – 7 Suggestions for Your Church (#0205)

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Roughly half of all American congregations now have a presence on Facebook.  While creating a presence is an essential first step, leveraging that presence requires effectively utilizing it and educating those who have affiliated with your page.  Randy Vaughn, one of two real life twin brothers who have teamed up to create The Marketing Twins, recently blogged about how churches can effectively utilize Facebook as a part of their social media strategy.   He recommends churches consider capitalizing on increased traffic for Christmas by:

  1. Create a Facebook page
  2. Teach fans to tag your page in their status updates
  3. Place a highly visible link to your Facebook page on your church’s website
  4. Add a customized welcome landing tab
  5. Link your blog to your Facebook page so that blog posts are imported automatically
  6. Optimize your Christmas events
  7. Ensure your key leaders have or establish personal profiles

So What?

If your church has more than a few people, you can be certain that those in your faith community are some of the 500 million + active Facebook users.  There is no longer a good reason to avoid using Facebook.  In reality, I know of several churches who waited so long to begin doing so that members had already set up unofficial pages either for the church or some of its more visible or youthful ministries.

Does your church have a Facebook page?

  • If not, will you commit to exploring the creation of a page in the next ten days?
  • If so, how many of the recommendations on Vaughn’s list have you already implemented?  Which additional one or ones will you commit to exploring in the next ten days?

If you are already utilizing these suggestions or plan to implement them in the near future, do you have an overall social media strategy or plan?

  • If not, will you commit to putting together a group to talk about creating such a plan in the first quarter of 2011?
  • If so, how has it helped you continue to grow your presence?

Have you considered using Facebook ads? If you are unfamiliar with them, I encourage you to read my recent thoughts.