Facebook

For the first time in my life, I’m down on Facebook.  I’ve always been a fan and staunch supporter.  I believe it has helped me better stay connected with friends than I ever would have without it.  I didn’t get upset over the various changes, privacy and layout, over the years.  I just liked Facebook.

That was until recently.  It seems like less and less of my closer friends are as active as they used to be.  Some are more involved, but it seems for me that Facebook isn’t providing me with...

There’s still plenty of debate in churches around the question of, “Is social media really relational?”  It’s probably a fair conversation to have as long as it’s not just an excuse to quickly dismiss using social media because it’s new or too hard to do.  But I’d like to layout my reasoning that social media is indeed relational.

In a recent interview with Christianity Today, Claire Diaz Ortiz, leader for social innovation at Twitter, talked about how social media makes perfect sense for...

You may not notice any visible changes with your church Facebook Page right now.  But the way your updates appear to your fans has already changed.  And soon, the appearance of your page will likely get a makeover, too.

First, let’s start by talking about how you share information with your fans.  The goal traditionally has been to get someone to Like your Page.  Once they hit that button, you were golden.  Updates appeared in their feed and life was good.  But when Facebook recently...

Recently, Facebook launched a pretty big new feature called Subscribe.  Here’s how Facebook describes it:

You've always been subscribed to friends. Now you can keep up with journalists, celebrities, political figures and other people you’re interested in too. You can get their public updates in your News Feed by going to their profile and clicking on the Subscribe button.

In essence it’s like an RSS feed that shows up in your Facebook feed and it changes how public figures can use...

You don’t need a Facebook page to be a growing successful church.  It’s true.  You also don’t need the biggest, awesomely feature-filled website either.  And you know what you really don’t need?  Twitter.

Those are probably the oddest few sentences I’ve written here at Church Juice especially when you consider how much time we dedicate to talking about using social media well or designing a great website.  But just having these tools won’t make you successful.  And guess what?  There are...

In the dark of the night, while Church Juice was asleep, our Facebook page magically loaded a map of our physical office location.  After weeks of canceling out of a request box to add our address, we saw that it just suddenly appeared on our page.  And while it’s a mystery to us how it happened—our leading theory is Mark Zuckerburg was up late on a programming binge that resulted in him taking a personal interest in Church Juice—the addition of our street address to our information did...

In one of its latest tweaks, Facebook now allows organizations to be tagged in photos.  And since there have been a lot of jokes about why people would ever want to tag the Coca-Cola that grandma is holding during a family BBQ. But I think there’s some practical reasons why this is a good new feature of churches.

It’s easier for people to share your church.  Tagging a picture is an easy, non-confrontational way for someone to integrate their church into their everyday online life.  Let’s say...

Facebook just launched a new feature called the Send button.  It’s much like its year-old brother the Like button, only it lets you target who you’re sending a link or information to.  The Like button has been imbedded in lots of non-Facebook websites.  Let’s say you’re reading a news article and find it interesting.  By clicking the Like button, you would share that in your Facebook news feed.  Now the Send button will do a similar action except that you pick individual people or a Group to...

Search engine optimization can be a confusing mess when you’re working on your website.  But for Facebook, there are some surprisingly easy things you can do to help boost your page ranking with Google and those other search engines that people say exist, but I’ve never seen.

• Pick a relevant page name and don’t change it.  Your page name appears in the title line of your page which helps search engines find it.  But Google will dock you some search love if that title line changes, so try not...

We’ve always said that a great way to increase interaction on your church’s Facebook page is to ask a question as a discussion starter.  Now Facebook has made that process a built-in, structured feature.

Facebook recently rolled out Questions.  To turn it on for your account, go to facebook.com/questions.  After that, Questions will become an icon option above the status box on your page. A Questions question follows a typical poll format.  There are several ways you can structure your...