This is an awesome video retelling 2011 in tweets.
Archives For twitter
Social media is a wonderful marketing tool, if used correctly, but just using it to link to your website is completely under utilizing the power that social media can provide for you. Social media should not be your only way to get your content to customers, but it can provide wonderful success. Another way to get people to your website is from search engine results which can be improved through SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
Until recently, these were two separate marketing streams used to promote your website, but now it is possible for your social media presence to improve your search engine results. Google’s ranking is directly affected by tweeted links and Facebook shares from influential social media people as well as when it comes from multiple sources. That means if Barack Obama who is currently the third most followed person on Twitter retweets your website article on politics or fifty people retweet that same article in a short amount of time, your website will move up on the results pages at Bing and Google.
This does not eliminate good content, being an active social media user, or using SEO tools to improve your website, but it does mean that you will need to do some research on your product or service to produce better results. In future posts we’ll will look at a few ways that we can improve this social media and SEO relationship.
Jeremy Smith is a 26 year old youth worker at the Air Force Academy chapel, working for Club Beyond, and attending Denver Seminary for his Master”s of Counseling in Mental Health. I have been involved in Youth for Christ for eight years and absolutely love sharing the life of Jesus with teens.
I have been married to my wonderful wife, Ashley, for two years and try to be the best husband I can be. I enjoy tennis, web designs, and reading books. A secret introvert, you will find many of my ramblings come from weeks and months of thinking about these topics and how they can help ministry today.
I started a new adventure this week. After 4 great years at Simply Youth Ministry, I’ve returned to Youth Specialties. I’m super excited about the opportunity. When I was serving in a church as a paid youth worker, I used their resources all the time and recieved encouragement and training from their events, and in 1998 I had the opportunity to join the YS team running the store at events and the IT guy for the office. Now I return as the Director of Digital Marketing which means I’ll be planning and building websites, plus dreaming up new ways we can serve youth workers online.
What does this mean for the blog? Not much, we’ll still be bringing you the same geeky thoughts, ideas and resources to help you in your ministry.
If you are coming to the National Youth Workers Convention this fall in San Diego or Atlanta please track me down and say “Hi”, I’ll also be leading a few technology seminars. I’d love to grab a coffee and talk about geeky stuff.
Also, if you’d like to know what crazy projects I’m working on, follow me on my new YS twitter account YSChrisDavis.
Simply Youth Ministry has always been about saving youth workers’ time. I too love efficiency. I want my computer to run faster. I organize files like an archivist. I even plan my calendar down to the day and hour I’m going to fill up my car with gas. Well, not that last one, but I LOVE being efficient. And the same goes for when I want to get the word out on a youth ministry event.
There are so many different social media routes to do ministry on, and you can spend/waste a lot of hours just keeping up with facebook, twitter, and now Google +. So here’s my philosophy on the proper role of social networks in youth ministry, and how to use them efficiently.
Social Networking is supplemental.
What I mean is that I believe social networking can only accomplish so much. I can keep in touch with hundreds of students, but those relationships must have a “real life” component for meaningful discipleship to occur. In other words, you have to have face time with individual students! Social networking is a bonus to, not the foundation of, a relationship. Therefore I will use social networking for a limited number of tasks.
- sharing event info
- writing quick notes of encouragement to students and volunteers
- checking a student’s wall to gather info that will help me minister to them
- making fun of students by posting pictures of them with panty hose on their heads
I really only spend 10-15 minutes a day on facebook. I see it as being supplemental to all of the other relationship building I do throughout the week. Now, how do we make it efficient?
Let technology work for you!
When I first began using social networks I would waste so much time writing individual posts for a blog, facebook, twitter etc. To be an efficient social networker you have to learn how to link accounts. When you link accounts, any information you share on one network gets automatically copied and pasted to the linked account. I began doing this with twitter and facebook. I love the brevity of twitter (you have to be efficient with 140 characters) so I linked twitter to my facebook using the facebook twitter app. Now when I tweet it instantly posts to facebook. Pretty cool huh? But I didn’t stop there…
Our youth ministry also uses the mass text messaging service SimplyText (now Communicate) from Simply Youth Ministry. When you create a text message in SimplyText you have the option to link to your twitter account. This means that every time I send a mass text message close to 300 students who subscribe instantly receive the message on their phones, and the message goes to twitter. Because my twitter is linked to my facebook account my status is also instantly updated. Plus, Simply Text allows me to set up multiple texts and assigned them to be sent at different times and dates. In one 20 minute sitting I can set up 2-3 weeks’ worth of text messages and forget about it. I know that every day for the next month close to 300 students will get daily contact from me, not to mention the 1000 people who follow me on twitter and facebook. Doing a month of social networking in 20 minutes… now that’s efficient!
For many companies, freelancers, pastors, and non-profit organizations,Twitter and Facebook might be one of only a few marketing tools at your disposal because of the fact that it is a free resource and your audience might already be participating in these social networks. It is important for companies to come across as professional, but there is conflicting advice out there on how to create a social media personality that will get your company the kind of professional attention you want.
So the question is, are you using these tools effectively or are you making a few beginner mistakes? Here are our top three mistakes made by people when they are trying to interact with customers, clients, and others interested in your company:
Not Engaging Your Followers
Do you read what people are saying about you or your products? Have you responded to comments they leave you? Do you even care about their thoughts? You should and if you are not, you are missing out on a golden opportunity to build relationships.
How should you be engaging your followers? Comment on photos they post on your Facebook page, thank them for comments they leave, respond to their @replies. Use Facebook’s Question app, poll followers on Twitter, and create a community built your account.
The lines of communication with those that follow you and you follow should be two-ways and it should start with you. Take the time to reply to your followers and let them know you’re listening to what they have to say. Engaging with this community can have long-term and lasting benefits.
Ignoring Negative Comments
One specific way of not engaging that gets its own point is that you don’t ignore negative comments directed at you or your company on social media sites. Treat every comment, positive or negative with your full attention, but in negative comments even more so should you engage the customer. One negative comment that is handled quickly and poorly could exacerbates the problem and make a fed up customer into someone who will publicly renounce you or your product. And ignoring them simply validates what they’re already feeling: that your company doesn’t care about their business.
Realize that if handled correctly, you could still come out with a new customer and even show others that you really care about their wants and needs. In some situations, a public comment followed up by a private message may be necessary, but inaction is the worst thing you could do. Sometimes just reaching out can be enough to turn a negative experience into a positive one.
Not Having a Plan
A few weeks ago I talked about the idea of having a Twitter strategy, but this can easily be applied to other social media tools with a little tweaking. Rushing into marketing with social media without a plan can cause confusion, frustration, and possibly lose customers and bad reputation.
Remember, what is posted on the Internet is there permanently. If you make mistakes in your social media marketing, they can come back to haunt you. This does not mean a strategy will make you flawless, but it will be the guidelines for how you proceed with social media. A few hours of time spent now on revising your strategy to be the best it can be can prevent many more hours or days of frustration and struggling to correct mistakes in the future.
About Jeremy Smith
Jeremy Smith is a 26 year old youth worker at the Air Force Academy chapel, working for Club Beyond, and attending Denver Seminary for his Master”s of Arts in Counseling Ministries. He has been involved in Youth for Christ for eight years and absolutely loves sharing the life of Jesus with teens. You can read more from Jeremy at seventy8productions.com.
Many of you liked the digital nativity video from Christmas. Igniter video has now done one for Easter.
If you want to use it for your services, you can pick it up HERE.
Description from their site:
Throughout the course of his public ministry, Jesus knew both the adoration and desertion of the crowds. Today, just as 2,000 years ago, the gospel asks a question that demands an answer: Will we follow? This video illustrates this truth through the dynamic lens of a 21st-century social network.
Enjoy!
I loved this video. Great way to image the birth of Jesus in our digital age.
Twitter announced today some upcoming changes to it’s web interface. They seem to be trying to bring a lot of the features that we all love about the various desktop clients we love to the web. They plan on splitting the screen in two, allowing one half to be your update stream and the second to be your followers, any media embedded into the stream, trends, and more. It’s a little reminiscent of the drawers they use in the new iPad app they released a few weeks ago. I don’t know if it will be enough to sway me from using Tweetie, but we’ll see.
Check out this video they made to show it off:
And just in case you don’t already, you can follow all the geekiness of this site at @ymgeek.
Working on some new stuff, but in the mean time enjoy this awesome video. I love these guys.
