Adam Bowers, owner of Adam Bowers Media, recently blogged about the advice he gives churches about creating social media goals. Since there is no universally accepted standard of success and no simple way for parishes to determine how their results compare to other churches, he presents a solid framework for developing a social media strategy:
- Do your homework – research pre-existing social media use at your church. Before you can formulate goals, you need to make sure that those goals would be reasonable based on how people in your congregation are already using social media.
- Determine the purpose of using social media. It’s easy to skip this step and move right into using it, but it’s really crucial in figuring out goals that make sense for your church. Why are you using social media? What needs does it address?
- Set large, less specific goals first. What do you want social media to be at your church? How is it going to be a tool for communication or a channel for ministry?
- Set very specific goals last. These are really the most important for actually setting a standard for how successful your social media use is.
So What?
It is far too easy for churches to fall into one of two extremes:
- Considering any involvement as success — often expressed as “we never did this before, so getting started is what matters for us”
- Beginning with very specific and lofty goals — often expressed as “if we are going to devote resources to social media we need assurance that we will have _______” (insert any very specific outcome of your choosing into the blank)
Social media is an important part of a congregation’s communication and, as such, deserves considerable planning. Likewise, once efforts are underway, they should be appropriately managed and evaluated.
- Has your congregation followed the four step process outline by Bowers or something similar? If not, how would you characterize your parish’s process?
- At this stage in your congregation’s experience, how do you define success in social media?