There are a lot of considerations when deciding to get involved in social media on behalf of your church. The easy part is creating profiles at the various sites. But along with doing that, you should do the following:

  • Come up with goals – how will you know if spending 20 hours a week on FaceBook is actually achieving anything?
  • Come up with some kind of policies – how much time do you expect staff to spend on social media? Will you allow your staff to post disparaging remarks about your church?
  • Create profiles at ALL of the social media sites (even if you don’t intend to use them) – this reserves your name for maybe using it the future, and prevents someone else from posting on your behalf
  • Tie all the profiles you do want to use together so that one post syndicates across all the sites – try Ping or PixelPipe
  • Set up a Google Alert to notify you whenever someone mentions the church name anywhere on the internet – remember, social media is a conversation, not a bullhorn

And as a primer, read through this short Top Ten List of do’s and dont’s.

Veterans – what else would you recommend?

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