Church Wellness

• Introduction
• Membership Development
  • Membership: Basic Concepts
  • Recruit New Members
    • Lead Generation
    • Push Marketing
    • Customer Evangelism
    • Responding to Visitors
    • Network Building
    • Marketing
  • Retain Current Members
    • Learn members' needs
    • Respond to Actual Needs
    • Market Effectively
    • Provide Multiple Ways In
    • Track Participation
    • Initiate Recruitment for Ministry
    • Provide "Customer Service"
  • Transformation of Lives
    • Small Groups
      • Basic Concepts of Small Groups
      • Primary Purposes of Small Groups
      • Operating Principles of Small Groups
    • Ministries That Promote Personal Change
• Leadership Development
  • On Church Leadership
  • Fundamentals of Church Leadership
  • Recruiting Leaders
  • Training Leaders
    • Family Systems
    • Life Cycles
    • Dysfunctional Church
    • Conflict Management
  • Supporting Leaders
• Communications Strategy
  • Changes in Communications Environment
  • Technologies
  • Effective Web Sites
  • Social Media Tools
• Spiritual Development
  • Basic Concepts of Spiritual Development
  • Focus on Classical Spiritual Disciplines
    • Prayer
    • Study
    • Fasting
    • Service
    • Giving
      • Five Critical Steps on Giving
    • Worship
    • Confession
    • Silence
  • Seeking a Balanced Spiritual Life
• Young Adult Ministries
  • Basic Concepts of Young Adult Ministries
  • Who Are They?
  • Focus on Five Areas
  • Staff Roles
  • Engage Young Adults in Identifying Obstacles
• Listening Church
  • Principles of Listening Church
  • Organizational Structure to Support Listening
  • Worship to Support Listening
  • Acting on Questions
  • Loving Starts in Listening
• Metrics
  • Age Audit
  • Basic Principle: "Test and Measure"
  • Developing Useful Measurements
  • Sample Metrics
  • Tracking Results
  • Outcome-Based Decision-Making

Social Media Tools

The communications field known as "Social Media" is expanding rapidly. New tools appear every day. Even if some don't prove useful or survive, social media are an important development and well worth learning their unique language and procedures. 

Twitter and Facebook, the two leading social media applications, offer unparalleled capability for building networks of people, for disseminating information rapidly, and for building your brand.

Do the math: you add one person as a "friend" on Facebook (not literally a "friend," but someone who agrees to receive your posts). When that person confirms you as a friend, Facebook presents six others from that person's list who might have mutual interests. You ask all six to be friends, and let's say four accept. Each of those four presents six more possible friends. One becomes four, four become 16, 16 become 64, and so on. At some point you start to see repeats, so it doesn't go on exponentially forever. But in short order, you can create a network of several hundred, or even several thousand people, who agree to let your posts into their inbox.

At that point, you need to master the unique language and style of Twitter and Facebook. Twitter allows up to 140 characters in a Tweet. You can say a lot in that length. Facebook posts can be longer, but you start to notice that shorter is more effective.

The best Tweets and posts contain useful links. You want your posts to get seen as useful and interesting. You'll notice many people describing their meals and outings. That's a fading use of Facebook. For extending your brand, position your brand (your congregation, your ministry) as useful, positive, respectful, clear. Keep pushing people to your web site. Sign them up for your blog. 

If you sign up for a blog like TechCrunch and SmartBrief, you will see articles about other social media, such as FourSquare, Tumblr, LinkedIn. 

You will find it helpful to use an aggregating tool like TweetDeck or HootSuite to present all of your social in one screen, with alerts of new postings..