It’s obvious that Twitter is getting bigger and is becoming more widely used.
For those ministries that believe it’s a valuable communication tool and medium, rock on and rock hard. You need no convincing. For many other ministries, though, Twitter may not be the right thing for you. That’s cool too and I see a lot of reasons not to do it too. All in wisdom, right?
For those ministries that may sit in the former puddle, here’s a cool trick to create a robust Twitter Activity Stream without having to create a ministry-specific or organizational-specific Twitter account:
Step 1:
Choose the staff members that are going to create content specifically for the organizational ministry stream.
Step 2:
Choose the hashtag [#nameofministry] that you’re going to use.
Step 3:
Go to search.twitter.com and type in the following in the search box:
Replace “#nameofministry-hashtag” with the hashtag you’ve chosen for your ministry/organization and switch out “staff1,” “staff2,” and “staff3″ for the Twitter usernames of the staff members that you’ve given permission to contribute to the ministry Twitter stream.
You can, of course, add as many “staff” members as you’d like.
What this will do is return only the results from those users who use that specific hashtag and no one else. This is how you manage quality control and make sure nothing “questionable” comes up on the stream from “unwanted” tweets.
Step 4:
Copy the “Feed for this Query” link.
This feed is specific to those Twitter results.
Step 5:
Display it proudly on your ministry blog or website.
There are a number of ways you could display it. If you’re using WordPress, you can use a RSS Widget and just plug the results right in.
That’s tight.
The sky is the limit here!
Have fun!
Not sure I understand. I've got how to create the feed. But I don't understand how the feed is displayed on the ministry site. Can you point to an example? Thanks
You could use a wordpress widget “RSS” and just copy and paste the feed link that you've created… voila!
Definitely doable. Or we could pray that Twitter wakes up and creates groups soon!
Let's build one. … .. .;)
if you build one
they will come
this is a great thing, never knew about the hash tag from:name thing
definitely going to try it
tks
Phill
Twitter groups would be awesome!! But for now, this is a great idea!!
word up.
Party on. This is awesome. I was wondering how you could control the "who" part of this type of content.
:0
You should also take a look at FriendFeed. FriendFeed can pull in data (import) from a lot of services. By using the FriendFeed Room feature you can create a small FriendFeed for yourself to suit purposes like this.
I have and i personally do not like friendfeed because it's just “too much”… but yes, you could do the same thing…!
thanks patrick!
john
I've seen this done on other blog sites like stevenfurtick.com, but had no idea how to do. thanks so much for this post! as we get ready to launch weekly services for #revolutionchurch in sacramento, we will be twittering during our gatherings so all we can do to show twitter connecting us in life is a good thing
thanks again john!!!
John (or anyone), is it possible to add additional staff to the approved list of those able to tweet to an "official" church hashtag once it is set up initially? I envision starting with a few staff, but adding more over time.
Sure, you can always change out the code.
This is great! Thanks for the instruction – simple & useful.