You login to Facebook to do some ministry but instead spend 30 minutes looking at what old friends are doing, following endless rabbit trails of links, and start playing Farmville and Fishville simultaneously.

To maximize your time spent on Facebook you need to optimize your news feed to eliminate distractions and allow for easy navigation of subgroups of people that pertain to ministry.

Do you have any tips that make you more effective?

UPDATE :

A couple of items in Brian’s screencast are now located in different places on Facebook; please see the images below.

To hide posts from a user, you now need to click on the 'X' at the right side of their post in your news feed.

To organize your friends into Lists, you must now begin by clicking the 'Edit Friends' link in the 'Account' drop-down menu ...

... then, in the Friends screen, click the 'Edit Lists' drop-down menu next to each friend, to choose which lists you want to add them to. Or click the '+ Create a List' button at the top of the screen to start a new one.

To view news updates from a particular friend list, choose it from the 'Most Recent' drop-down menu on the News Feed page.

Here’s a screencast that shows you how to integrate blog posts from your campus website with your Facebook Fan page so that you can maximize your visibility with your students.

With so many things fighting for the attention of the average college and high school student, it can be a struggle getting students to show up for anything, including class. The social media landscape, however, can make it a lot easier for your ministry to cut through the noise by greatly increasing the number of people you reach, and making it easier to promote and organize an event.

Here’s a tutorial from Mashable.com about how to organize an event with Facebook. Facebook Events Guide

Social media, and Facebook specifically, give your ministry the opportunity to:

• Go Viral With Every Event and Outreach

People you invite through Facebook can invite their network of friends. Your ministry’s event also shows up in their news feeds, all of which serves to increase the visibility of your ministry. Not only is your ministry gaining visibility to a much larger audience this way, but each Facebook invite is much more effective than a random flier because it’s a personal invite from a friend.

• See Who’s Been Invited

Facebook lets you see who’s attending, who’s not, and who hasn’t replied to the invite. This is great if you have friends in common with other people involved in your ministry. Now you can avoid having someone get the same invite from you and 30 of your friends. Seeing who’s invited can also help you make sure that nobody gets left out or falls through the cracks.

• Send Event Updates

With a Facebook event, you can send messages to those attending your event to let them know about changes in plans, venue rules, or background information about the guest of honor. And if your ministry is doing a really big event that requires you to do a lot of early planning and promotion, like a spring break or missions trip, an occasional message can help maintain excitement and build buzz for your event.

Do you have any other ideas for using social media to organize and promote an event? Let us know.

Related Articles:
Event Promotion Basics on Facebook

How to Use Facebook to Grow Your Ministry

Facebook Tip: Save Time and Maximize Your Ministry

Fan Pages vs. Groups – What’s the Difference?

photo courtesy of frozenchipmunk CC BY 2.0

Facebook can be a great place to promote your event. Here are some basics of promoting a ministry event on Facebook, especially looking at linking to external pages & news feed tips.

Mashable.com did a great post about 4 myths of social media and business.

Mashable: 4 Myths About Social Media and Business

After reading it, I started thinking about how these principles might apply in a ministry context.

MYTH #1: My Ministry Needs to Have a Presence On EVERY Social Media Outlet

Sure, you want to stay ahead of the curve and remain relevant, but you also want to make sure you’re going where your audience is, and maximizing your visibility and engagement with them in those spaces. In some cases, that does mean having a presence on every social media outlet. But in other cases, especially where you have limited time and resources, it may mean that you focus your efforts on a few key social spaces.

For example, lets say your focus is college students on a particular campus. Students on your campus might be very active on Facebook, but what if they’re not using Twitter at all yet? In this particular case, it may not make that much sense to devote time into maximizing your Twitter presence, especially if it’s going to take away from your Facebook strategies. From a branding perspective, I think it would make a lot of sense, however, to go ahead and snag a Twitter account before someone else gets the one you want. This way, just in case your students start using Twitter, or whatever the next big social media thing is, tomorrow, you’ll be ready to act.

MYTH #2: Set It and Forget It

When it comes to your ministry’s web presence, you shouldn’t have an attitude of “build it, and they will come.” People expect social media to be very dynamic, and if you don’t give people a new reason to come back to your site everyday, it won’t be long before they forget about you. Content really is king, and making sure you always have new content is key. It also helps to integrate your different online spaces, like a blog and a Facebook page for example, to help maximize the visibility of your content. Simply having a few key Facebook friends share or “like” your blog post or note can do wonders to drive traffic to your blog and fan page. Check out this post we did about one easy way to integrate a blog and Facebook fan page: Facebook Share Button

And a tool like Google Analytics makes it really easy for you to set goals for your blog, and measure them.

MYTH #3: If They’re Not Talking About Me, I Don’t Need To Be There

People may not be talking directly about your ministry online, but I’m sure people are talking about subjects that relate to your ministry. Listening to what people are saying online is a great opportunity to engage people in conversations, meet other people’s immediate felt needs, and possibly gain an even bigger audience. A lot of companies have started doing this by extending their customer service to Twitter. It seems like every week, I hear a story about someone who tweets their frustrations about a product or company, only to be contacted by that company to see what they can do. If people are willing to talk about it, why can’t Christians do the same thing? Doing a Twitter search for the phrase “I hate God” can be an easy way to find someone who’s willing to have a pretty deep conversation.

MYTH #4 Social Media is ONLY for Broadcasting MY Message

Social media spaces, like your blog and Facebook fanpage, shouldn’t be treated like your personal soap box where you try to blast everyone with a loud message, in the hopes of drowning out everybody else. A social media strategy that’s focused on one way communication is certain to fail. And in a ministry context, it will probably make you more enemies than friends. So treat your online friends like your offline friends. Play nice. Ask questions. Respond to people’s comments, and strive to engage in conversations and develop dialog.

Check out this great interview with Jeff Widman, a Facebook and marketing expert, about how to use Facebook to grow your brand and business. He makes some great points about how to maximize your visibility on Facebook, and some of the distinctions between fan pages and groups.

How to use Facebook to Grow Your Brand: a podcast from Jeff Widman

Even though Jeff is talking about businesses, many of these principles apply to ministry too. The one point he makes that I don’t believe is as applicable to ministry on college campuses is when to use a Facebook fan page versus a group. I would contend that ministries seeking to maximize their visibility, brand equity, and increase their overall reach on a college campus should use both, but for different types of communication:

• Fanpages: A many to many engagement level. Mass public communication. This is where you would engage and communicate with EVERYONE in a movement or campus. This also includes people who are casually involved, or are just curious about what your ministry is all about.

• Groups: A one to many engagement level. More specialized communication to a smaller and less public group. This is where you would engage and communicate with smaller core groups of people like, for example, your lead volunteers or student leaders. This can be very useful in communicating information that you wouldn’t necesarily want to broadcast to the masses, like time or location changes for your next planning meeting, because it’s not applicable to everyone.

If nothing else, at least listen to the interview to catch Jeff’s tips about some of the nuances of engaging people through status updates and the News Feed.

Check out this article from Mashable for more info about the differences between fan pages and groups.

Facebook Pages vs Facebook Groups: What’s the Difference?

And check out these other posts for more info about using Facebook in ministry:
Facebook Training for Ministry–When to Use a Group Page

How to Set Up a Facebook Fan Page–Step by Step Screencast

Facebook Event Promotion Basics

The Like button on Facebook seems trivial but can be a powerful tool for online ministry. Seriously. Everything added or subtracted to Facebook has a clear purpose: “To help you connect and share with friends.”

What happens when you like something?

• The post/photo/video that you liked get “pushed” to the newsfeed of all of your friends, making that item less anonymous.
• It increases the chances that the post will be featured in “Top News” section of the newsfeed, which keeps stories up for a longer time than “Most Recent”
• If that story/photo/video that you liked happens to be on a fan page or group page then Facebook will aggregate (bring into your newsfeed) other stories liked on that fan page.

Ways to use the Like button for ministry:

• For your key events make sure you get as many people as possible to like the post. I do this at Chico by texting my student leaders and asking them to Like it, and then text some others who will do the same. If the event is not Liked or commented on, then the chances of someone seeing it their newsfeed is reduced, since they would have to be looking at their feed around the time that it was posted.
• Put some incentives around people Liking a post on your wall. Example: We raffled off something at our meeting from the people who liked or commented on a particular post on our fan page. The purpose was to get less involved students to interact with our fan page, so that in the future it would increase their chances of seeing posts from our fan page on their wall. If you join a fan page but do not interact with its content the chances of you seeing content from that page are decreased.

This post from Campus Crusade’s Fan page showed up in my Top News feed because I interact with the page often.

Here’s an example of Chico CRU’s fan page that received a few likes. Remember this is significant because these interactions play a significant part in spreading this content across the fans and friends of fans of this page.

To read more about the button:

An Article explaining more about the button

How to add a Like button to WordPress posts

This is an excerpt from a webinar that focused on the differences between a fan page and group page, the viral action created by using a fan page, as well as tips for how to train students to use facebook for minstry. Check out our other Facebook related posts and videos for more info.

Brian Barela is the Director of New Media at Campus Crusade for Christ. He blogs regularly about leadership, social media, and starting a ministry.

Back in June, Mashable posted a great article highlighting five Facebook fan pages, and what they’re doing right.

Killer Facebook Fan Pages: 5 Inspiring Case Studies

There are so many great things to take away from these five examples that apply to any fan page. Here are a few that really struck me.

• Videos Are Your Friend

  Videos can be a great way for your fan page to get attention. They can be fun to watch, easy to make, and more importantly, they can go viral. Using your fan page as a distribution hub can give you another level of engagement and conversation with your fans. It also gives your fans the opportunity to “Like” your videos, thus sharing and endorsing your fan page to all of their friends. This can be great if you’re promoting a conference or event to students involved in your ministry. Post fun videos about the event before, during, and after the event actually happens to generate buzz and awareness about your ministry.

• Encourage User Participation

  Coca-Cola has found some really innovative ways of letting their fans own the fan page. Their fans don’t just comment on updates and share random videos from the fan page. Their fans contribute content (videos and photos) to the fan page. Coca-Cola fans aren’t just fans, but engaged members of a community. Fan pages for ministries can do similar things by hosting photo and video contests, and by letting fans post pictures and videos of events.

• Status Updates: The Double Edged Sword

  The Starbucks fan page is a great example of how to get the most out of your status updates, and a lot can be learned from how they’re using their status updates to engage with fans rather than just blasting them with shameless self-promotion. Be warned though: Use status updates the right way and you can create a great environment for two way communication. Use status updates the wrong way and people may start ignoring you, or even blocking you from their news feeds. Don’t use your status updates just to promote your ministry to the masses. Ask your fans questions, listen to their answers, and share other sources of content that are relevant to them.

Be sure to check out the full article on Mashable.com. There are so many more great examples of how to engage your fans that anyone can implement, not just fortune 500 companies.

Lifechurch.tv has created a library of Facebook training videos – Training Videos from Lifechurch.tv. These videos are a great resource to anyone looking to increase the online presence of their Christian ministry, especially for those just getting started with social media. Having a Facebook page can increase the scope and reach of your Christian ministry by helping you to establish an online presence, as well as giving your ministry a deeper level of engagement and more frequent connection with the people who are involved with your church or ministry.

The videos in the library can be streamed or downloaded.

Topics covered include:

• Organizing and Promoting Events
• Customizing Your Page
• Insights and Metrics – Measuring the Success of Your Page
• Updating Your Fans
• Writing Notes
• Photos
• Videos
• Wall Updates

What are some ways your ministry is using Facebook?