So you’ve setup a Facebook Page and Twitter account for your church/ministry, and even have followers that are engaged. Great!
Now each time you want to update your followers you can visit each site to send separate updates and then monitor each for incoming communications as well (not-so-great).
While there is no shortage of tools available to help you manage your Facebook, Twitter and other social media profiles there are a handful that stand out.
One of those is HootSuite which has continued to improve it’s feature set with a prominent feature being — it’s free!
Get Setup
You will first need to setup a new account and configure your social media accounts.
Not only can you add Twitter and Facebook Pages, but Facebook profiles, LinkedIn, Ping.fm, MySpace, WordPress.com, and now FourSquare.
You can also add more than one account for many services (e.g. if you have different accounts for different ministry areas).
Get Organized
By default each new account configured will create a new tab on your home screen or “Streams” view. Each tab will contain multiple columns or “streams.”
The default streams configured for a Twitter account would be Sent Tweets, Home Feed (tweets from your followers), Mentions, Direct Messages and Pending Tweets (that’s right, you can schedule future updates to any account). The defaults are nice and familiar, but by creating custom tabs and streams you can really begin to follow what’s going on.
There are many possibilities, but we’ll suggest a couple of tab configurations to get you started. To add your own tab click the ‘+’ button to the rights of the tabs and call it Dashboard (or catchy heads-up phrase of your choice).
The Dashboard
First things first, you need to know when people are talking directly to you. You should now be looking at an empty tab, so let’s add some streams.
First select the type of account and then the type of stream:
- Twitter – Mentions
- Twitter – Direct Message (Inbox)
- Facebook – News Feed
You can also add streams to follow what others are saying about you by adding Twitter search streams. There is a link to reveal plenty of examples for how to find the results you want, but here are some ideas:
- Mentions of full names of your staff (e.g. “John Doe” or “Pastor Bill”)
- Your full church name (e.g. “My Community Church”)
- Your domain name
Scheduling Messages
Another great feature is the ability to schedule messages to be posted later. If you want to schedule reminders for an upcoming event or if you’re burning the midnight oil and want an update to go out when others are actually awake this feature can be great.
You may want to create another tab just for your pending updates to keep them all in one place. You can always go back and edit messages until they are sent.
Sharing the Load
These features are great and can help you keep your social presence in check, but wouldn’t it be great to have other staff or a volunteer help out?
For each social account you can add “team members” to help share the load. Any team member can then send messages, respond to followers or assign messages to other team members for follow-up.
To add new team members:
- Click on the owl icon in the upper left > Settings > Social Networks
- Click the “Add New Team Member” button
- Enter an e-mail address for the new member and select the social networks you want to give them access to
Once they have signed up with HootSuite they will have access to the specified social profiles without requiring the password.
Just One of Many
HootSuite is just one of many tools out there and we’ve discussed a few ideas of how to implement it for your church.
There are many more features worth investigating, but we’ve covered the basics.
What tools and strategies have you leveraged to engage your community?
Jeff Jackson Jr. says
Hootsuite is personally one of my favorite tools to use for all of my social networking needs. The new HTML5 feel makes it a lot easier to manage. One thing I did to make my Hootsuite experience easier is to get the Fluid app which is conveniently located on the Hootsuite website. It frees up some of my space on my browser (Chrome) and is just easy to update just like a TweetDeck or any other type of desktop social networking app.
Brent says
I had seen Fluid but haven’t given it a try yet. I have used the iPhone app but it lacks Facebook Page integration currently.
You can find them all here:
http://hootsuite.com/apps
Tim McDaniel says
I just began using HootSuite yesterday. I’m looking forward to scheduling my church’s Facebook page updates.
Brent Mitchell says
Awesome! What type of messages will you be scheduling?
Another feature you may have already found, if you have an RSS feed from a web site you can automate updates based on the feed.
PhillipGibb says
I love hootsuite, it is my go-to social media tool of choice.
Jumped to it ever since it went html5.
Now I use it to help with my church account, my own, and my new synapticlight – all without accidentally tweeting from the wrong account. Also my facebook profile and page.
It is awesome on my 24″ (at home)
I just wished I could setup Digg in it as well.
Adam Lehman says
I manage 5 different social media identities and using Hootsuite allows me to keep each of them fresh and updated regularly.
I spend time in the morning scheduling posts for each one, and then I just monitor the interactions throughout the day.
Jeff Bergstrom says
Does anyone know if HootSuite tracks clicks on links the way CoTweet does?
John Saddington says
it can, yes.
Brent Mitchell says
In a similar way, yes. Hootsuite uses it’s own URL shortners, ow.ly and ht.ly. The later will also show a “Social bar” at the top of the web page it opens (More info: http://blog.hootsuite.com/htly-owly/)
Unfortunately it appears only tweeted links are tracked and not links posted to Facebook, but there’s another option when linking to your own web site. In Hootsuite you can also connect to your Google Analytics account and view tweets alongside your website stats to gauge how well your updates are driving traffic. You can then filter your web stats by Source, Medium or Campaign (all attributes you can set in the shortened URL). — Partial win
Trevor Taylor says
I like me some Hootsuite. The main features that I like: easy url shortening with click tracking and scheduled posting.
Jerry Fultz says
Thanks for this post. I was up & running within a short period of time.