Blog

(Scott McClellan helps put the Echo Conference together and is the former editor of Collide Magazine.)

Anyone can set up a social media profile.  People set up accounts acting like cats. But can we have a strategy?

Two basics ways to grow social media (you can use a mix of both):

• Connected first.  When Oprah joined Twitter she had a millions followers fast.  She’s already established.  It’s not Lady Gaga’s content that got her 8 million followers.  You can leverage your connections in a smaller way
• Content first.  These are people no one has heard of before they joined social media. Look at Bad Banana on Twitter for example.  He tweeted funny stuff and it ballooned. No ad campaign.  No email list.  The content was so good it spread.  With social media, good content finds it way around the internet.

Five verbs that should be a part of your social media strategy.

• Listen.  People are talking, but what if we started with listening?  What if we used it like a grandma who just likes to look at pictures of the grandkids?  As a church, you could follow people in your church to get a feel for what they care about.  If there’s a community you’re trying to serve, follow and listen to them.
• Converse. Social in social media implies that it’s two way.  Churches are good broadcasters and trying to port that to social media fails.  It doesn’t send the message you want.  It says, “I’m important and you’re only as important as the stuff of mine you click on.”  As organizations we love to broadcast.  Conversing is different than what we do lots of time as a church.
• Share. It sounds a lot like broadcasting, but it’s different in mindset.  Sharing is about giving gifts to people.  Broadcasting is drawing eyeballs.  Sharing is about saying here’s something you might like even though we didn’t create it.  Or if you did make it, tell why you created something for someone.
• Tell stories.  This is difficult in 140 characters. short blog formats or short videos.  Committing to telling stories commits you to observing stories.  You start listening as you walk through the church, or as you follow people on twitter, in a different way because you’re looking for a story to tell.
• Invite.  Social media gives us the power to invite people into the work God is doing and the stories God is telling.  It allows the stories we tell to spread (when we’re telling good stories). 

Questions for you to ponder.

• What is your mission? (Mission statement)
• What is your social media mission?  (We’re good at having church mission statements, but we’re bad at having social media mission statements.  We’ve opened a tool where we have no mission for why we're doing this and what we hope will come of it.  Get more laser focused than just a digital extension of your organizational statement.  We got on Facebook to do what?  If we don’t know where we’re going, we have no idea if we’re getting there.)
• What other people or other organizations are already doing this?  (It’s okay to learn from the strategies of other people.)
• How vital is social media success to your organization? 
• What resources are you going to commit to make sure you’re going to reach your social media goals?  (If you’re not committing resources to it, that means you really don’t want it.)
• Who is going to be in charge of this?  (If no one takes charge, your social media ends up like that abandoned couch on the curb.)
• What platforms are you going to use?
• How will you know if your strategies and efforts are working?  (Measureables are good.  We will know of this is working if ______.)
• What challenges are you going to face?  (Knowing ahead of time won’t make them go away, but it will make you ready to deal with them.  This is going to be tough because _____.)