Reaching out…

Regionally each social network site varies as to which tool the majority of the community is using. There are some universals that we will use as a baseline.

Be disciplined about adding friends:

People in ministry tend to be fantastic networkers. Meaning, we are social being and can reach a lot of people quickly. I went from 0 friend to 525 friends in a period of 5 months. My wife did the same. In general the discipline of adding 1-2 friends a day doesn’t take much time, but produced incredible results. The more people on your friend list, the more people who can receive the message of the great work that you are doing for your organization, in my case Young Life. The thing is that the Social Networking site becomes an extension of your ministry. Meaning, you are able to increase the reach of what you are doing to a larger audience by adding people.

Be disciplined about keeping your account current

Currency in the news business is key, if the info is out of date, you lose credibility. So in general it is a good idea to get on your tool of choice once 3-4 times a week and update your status, and comment on a couple of other key people’s status.  This keeps you getting regular touches with those people and casts a much larger shadow than you are actually casting.

One tool that was reported to be helpful was Ping.fm ( http://www.ping.fm ). This was a tool that allows you to update multiple social networks sites with a single post. Again, casting a greater shadow than the effort that is put into it.

A tool that I have created for facebook called CrossReference (http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=41805038939) keeps track of when your network is online and allows you to schedule posts for when you aren’t online.  So you could site down at the beginning of the week and post a bunch of items that won’t show up in the feed until they are scheduled to.

Create a  group for your Organization:

These are important relationships and a great way to keep track of students long after they have graduated/ left your influence. It is a great way to distribute information about meetings ( club, campaigners), and to connect with kids. As well as a lot of free publicity for your organization.

Keep a blog about your ministry

Keep a blog of stories about the front. This has been an incredible source of dialog for our effort in Jefferson County. In general I would stay away from Facebook/MySpace blogs because we want to know who is accessing our blog, what they are looking at, how long they are staying and what content they are after based on the keywords that they used to get there.

Post links to your blog

Be aware of When you post….

I have kept track of of usage patterns on our blog, in general we get between 1 and 5 users a day. When I post a link to facebook, I get a pretty good spike in traffic, and when I am calculated about when I post a link to facebook, I have a pretty continual spike in traffic.

Facebook Spike	Organic Traffic	Scheduled post
A link posted to facebook, creates a spike in traffic, but a quick falloff the next day.	Traffic on an average week, between 1 and 5 organic hits	When you schedule a send, the traffic increase is constant and increased.

Catchy titles help

This goes back to self promotion, ask yourself which would I rather read “A story about a kid” or “Free ponies and racecars” It make a difference about how much traffic in generated as a result. A senior pastor in Auburn who keeps a daily blog with traffic ranging from 40-80/days sees traffic of 80 when he has a catchy title  and 40 when he does not.

Change your status to the link for the day

People love status messages, it is an easy way to keep track of friends, what they are working on and what is going on in your life. Many organizations/individuals have multiple Social networking presence. Use all of them to point at your changed content. ( Twitter/Facebook/MySpace ) So your link might say: Paul updated his blog ( http://www.jcyl.org )

Don’t crosspost the same message between groups.

This means don’t post a link to Facebook and then post the same link to a Facebook group, if you do Facebook will block your account as a penalty. Now, I am not sure if you can change the content of the posts, but still post the same link, but be careful, if you account gets disabled then the game is over.

Fall in love with Google Analytics!

This is an incredible tool that provides you all kinds of information about your group. For example I know who is coming, where they are coming from, how long they are staying, what they are reading, what are the search terms that they are using to get there. A lot of that drives the content that I create. For example, I kept getting searches on the term “Cross Talk” this is the term that we use in Young Life for presentation of the gospel. I have probably had 10 different Google Searches land on my site because they were looking for help in creating a Cross Talk, in fact, there may be people reading this now trying to figure it out, and stumbled across it because of the last sentence.