Media for Ministry -- Ministry Training » Training Videos

Facebook Tip: Fix Your News Feed & Save Time

Brian Barela — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 14:55:33 +0000

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.

How to Integrate Blog Posts from Your Website & Your Facebook Fan Page

sam — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 07:55:03 +0000

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.

USTREAM Streaming Video on Your WordPress Blog

Chris Zaugg — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 15:00:38 +0000

Using a USTREAM live video feed on your blog is easy, and it makes finding your streaming feed easy for your target audience! This screencast tutorial will help you embed both video and chat on your WordPress blog. NOTE: If you scroll down this page, you’ll see I have pasted some code that I refer to in this video. You can cut and paste it when you go through the setup.

This is #2 in a series. Click here for #1.

HTML code for your blog:

////Your video embed here////

////Your chat embed here////

USTREAM Live Video Streaming Setup

Chris Zaugg — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 13:00:10 +0000

USTREAM is a great tool to use for virtual meetings, allowing you to broadcast your meeting, and chat live with your viewers. Here’s a screencast that shows you how to login & set up video settings in USTREAM. (Addendum: At one point I mention “flash” based cameras, when I meant to say “firewire” based cameras.)

Livestream Audio & Video Initial Setup

sam — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 07:26:21 +0000

Livestream can be a great tool to use for virtual meetings, allowing you to broadcast your meeting, and chat live with your viewers. Here’s a screencast that shows you how to login & adjust your initial audio & video settings of livestream.

Facebook Event Promotion Basics

sam — Fri, 20 May 2011 08:38:51 +0000

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.

Facebook Training Videos From Lifechurch.tv

sam — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 10:08:03 +0000

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?

Facebook: Videos, Photos, and Notes

sam — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 08:11:21 +0000

Videos, photos, and notes are a great way for any Christian ministry, church, or movement to further engage, connect, and start conversations with people on Facebook. For example, you could share photos and videos from a recent community outreach, and invite people to comment and tag people they know in the photos. By doing so, not only are you connecting with people already involved in your ministry, but you’re also giving your ministry a chance to appear in their newsfeeds so that their friends can possibly connect with you.

Check out these video tutorials from LifeChurch.tv to learn how to make use of videos, photos, and notes in Facebook.

Video Training

Photos

Notes

Facebook Pages, Groups, and Profiles

sam — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 15:11:28 +0000

Edit: Since making this screen cast, Facebook has changed the way their Groups product works. The biggest change is that you can no longer send a direct message to a group. All of the principles for deciding when to use a group versus a page still apply though.

Between pages, groups, and personal profiles, there are a lot of ways for a Christian ministry to promote community and engagement on Facebook. Understanding the nuances between the three can be a little tricky though. Here’s a screen cast to help you get started.

Ideally, to maximize your online presence, you and your ministry should use all three. Here’s how.

Personal Profile:

personal connections on a one-to-one level.

Pages (Previously known as Fan Pages):

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 and want to explore your ministry first.

Other advantages to a page over a group or profile include:

A corporate voice: Communication can come from the organization, which is constant, rather than depending on the names and faces of ministry leaders which has the potential to change regularly
Customization: Bring unique functions and a unique look to your page with customized tabs and images. For example, you can use a custom tab for conference registrations.
Custom URL: Helps build the name and credibility of your ministry

Groups:

These are optimized for 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. They can also be helpful for organizing Bible study groups. 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.

Check out these other resources for tips on how to maximize your ministry’s presence on Facebook

Facebook Pages – 5 Great Examples

Custom URL’s for Pages

How To Think About Your Online Ministry Presence

sam — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 18:56:19 +0000

An online home for your Christian ministry can help you reach out to people that you may not have ordinarily met, facilitate deeper conversations, build community, and increase the level of engagement and involvement among the people already involved with your ministry. But with so many options out there on the world wide web, knowing where to start can be a little daunting. It can also be overwhelming thinking that you need to a create community on every social media platform that exists (like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, or a blog), especially when it seems like there’s a new social media darling cropping up every six months.

This screencast will give you a framework to help you think through where you should start, in terms of social media and the online world, and how you should prioritize your time so that your online presence can be as focused as possible.

In most cases, a custom blog or website will make the most sense for an online home base because of the level of consistency, customization, and control it offers you. But in other cases, an online home base on an established social network like Facebook might make more sense because of Facebook’s ease of use, and because of the huge numbers of people already on it. To find the online home base that makes the most sense for your ministry, you’ll want to think through these questions:

What are the goals of your online presence?
Where do the people you want to connect with spend their online time?

For example, if you are in college ministry in the US, it might make sense to use a Facebook page as your home base since the students you’d be ministering to spend most of their time on Facebook already. It can also be very challenging to get people to leave their Facebook ecosystems to go to your website. So rather than creating an online island and hoping people show up, it may make sense for your ministry to live where your audience lives. Sure, you lose some control with Facebook, but the potential of connecting with a much larger group of people in the ecosystem where they’re spending the most time could be well worth it.