Ah, the good old days of playing six degrees of Kevin Bacon. Who was the girl in the movie with him where he did that thing? Man I stunk at that game. Even so, Kevin Bacon was a good example of how small the world was; well, at least in the movie industry. Now a days, the world has gotten even smaller with the advancement of social media. For instance, the other day I looked at my LinkedIn and I’m 2 degrees away from our good buddy living in that white house with the great front yard. Oh yeah! The question is, how can we leverage this social small world for getting out the gospel?
It’s as simple as saying please.
Recently my church participated in a community service project in our local metropolitan area. This was a big deal. We brought nearly 1/3 of the volunteers to the project, but this was only half of what was going on. The other side was all about social media. We wanted to trend.
The volunteers from my church were instructed to tweet, while on the project about the experience, using a predefined hash tag. If it was pictures, check-ins, or @replies we wanted the hash tag on them. While the service project was going on, three of us were tweeting out to local celebrities, athletes, restaurants, etc., asking for retweets. Within an hour the hash tag was trending locally, and within three hours the church twitter account was too.
Between the three of us asking for retweets, we may have had 2,000 followers. After all was said and done, we had over 300,000 impressions of our tweet via retweets! All we did was ask.
The ultimate goal for the day was to show the church’s support for the community, and through it, direct people back to the church to hear the gospel. It’s clear to see that with the retweets we received, quite a few people saw the church’s impact on the service project. Not only was the name recognition beneficial for this event, but it set the groundwork in a way to be leveraged in the future.
Twitter can be used for so much more in furthering God’s kingdom than simply posting what songs your church choir is singing on a given Sunday. We need to think bigger when it comes to how we use social media. Some times it only takes a little bit of bacon. #pun
[Image via sagindie]
Dustin W. Stout says
Fantastic idea Matt! I recently heard in a seminar about social media that tweets that ask for a RT are 4x more likely to be retweeted– tweets that actually spell out “please Retweet” (as opposed to “please RT”) are 5x more likely to be retweeted!
I will be heading over to Twitter now to follow you! 😉
Matt Pugh says
Thanks Dustin! When we realized that you’re only asking for 140 characters of someones time, it became a lot easier to ask. And really, if they don’t, what do you loose?