We tweeted a link to this compelling advice from one of social media’s leading voices.
Since we are just starting with Twitter and have a small following, we are providing a link on this post. His arguments are on target. Church leaders need only substitute the ecclesiastic equivalent to the business world to understand the analogy. His advice applies to any church serious about mission.
Here’s the link. Please, TWEET it as part of our experiment.
Google Twitter. The Twitter site will come up first in Google results and you will see the sub-option SIGN UP. Click on that and follow the instructions.
You will need to supply your name and an email address. You can use your current email or open a free account dedicated to Twitter — it’s up to you. We did not have a dedicated 2×2 email address before. We opened a free G-mail account with Google.
You will have some options in creating a profile. Twitter will guide you through the start-up steps. Don’t be alarmed that you are asked to choose some people or organizations to follow right from the start. Twitter will present lists of celebrities who might appeal to your interests. You may have no interest in any of them. (We followed Lady Gaga, Steve Carrell and National Geographic. How’s that for eclectic!)
All of this is just to get you going. Twitter is all about following and being followed and they are trying to teach you good Twitter habits from the start. You can unfollow (stop following) any person or organization at any time. Stick with the ones that are fun. Click “unfollow” if they annoy you (there will be some that bombard you with self-promotion). By taking note of what annoys us, we will be able to figure out how we want to be perceived on Twitter.
We met our daily goal. We posted a blog about tweeting. We retweeted something we liked. We posted our Riddle Tweet and followed up with the answer an hour later (following the professional advice to not tweet more than once in an hour). In addition, we tweeted our worship plans for tomorrow.
Spent about a half hour writing today’s blog post and less than 10 minutes on Twitter.
Our post picked up one “Like” so far. (Thanks, Christian).
2×2 started with no followers yesterday. We have four followers today.
If you want to follow our month-long Twitter experiment, join Twitter and follow us at:
So what should we tweet about? That IS the question.
We noticed that South Dakota Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America began their Advent season by tweeting the first verse of a popular Advent hymn:
Light one candle to watch for Messiah. Let the light banish darkness.
That’s a nice thought. We will retweet it. (More on retweeting later).
But we are also remembering the advice from the pros: social media is about connecting with others. If we want followers, our tweets have to appeal to others or people will just gloss over them. So we are going to work on a mix of material to use in our tweets. We won’t avoid the message of the Gospel but we will talk about things that might appeal to an even broader audience. In addition we will write about things happening here in our neighborhood (roughly East Falls, Germantown, Wissahickon, Manayunk and Roxborough and the tail end of City Line Avenue in Philadelphia).
We are going to start with something just for fun. It’s a riddle. We’ll pose the question in the first tweet and an hour or so later, we will tweet the answer.
Remember, we are new at this, too. This is a process of discovery for all of us.
So today’s task won’t take more than 10 minutes and half of that will be first time jitters.
Retweet the South Dakota Synod’s tweet.
Tweet our own riddle.
Tweet the answer to our riddle.
If you want to take part in the experiment. Start your Twitter account and start following us! We will follow you back! Let’s see if Twitter is as powerful as they say it is!
Facebook, the king and queen of social media, has some problems as a platform for churches.
To be used well, it is a lot of work.
It is unabashedly about monetization of cyberspace.
The rules change frequently.
It can easily become more intimidate than a congregation of unrelated people want to be part of. Facebook rules just changed recently to make posts more public than many users ever intended their Facebook pages to be. We’ll wait with everyone else for the fallout on that.
Facebook has been embraced by business and some nonprofits. They are more likely to have a top-down structure with monetary and hierarchical controls. In other words, Facebook will be part of somebody’s job. It might be their whole job. Few churches can afford that!
Twitter on the other hand comes with some control. You can create a following but you can direct your “tweets.”
The Twitter platform is stripped to the bone. You are limited to 140 characters (practically 120 characters). Who can’t write one sentence a day!?
Let’s look at Twitter. What is it, anyway?
Twitter is a social media platform first designed for people to answer the question, “What are you doing?”
People send simple, short messages. No pictures. No video. No fancy type.
The first reaction from the public, the echoes of which can still be heard, was “I don’t care what you are doing!”
But some people kept reporting their activities to the world anyway.
They soon learned the difference between “This sandwich is delicious.” and “Route 95 is backed up 20 miles. Stay away!”
Slowly with explosive bursts of potential, the world began to realize that there is power in caring about what someone else is doing and how we can influence what happens to them.
Does that not sound mission-oriented?
The power of Twitter is in making connections. Once those connections are made. It is really up to us what we do with them. Twitter is the spark.
There is a good explanation of this power in the book The Tao of Twitter, by Mark Schaefer. There are many good books explaining Twitter. Most of them are written from a marketing point of view. Marketers tend to love numbers and analytics, which if you can bear reading them, are impressive.
(We’ve provided a link to Amazon in our widget column for this inexpensive book.)
Most pastors and church people are not “numbers” people. If they were, they may have already fled the church scene. Church numbers are dismal at first glance and alarming with analysis.
Mark’s book dwells on Twitter’s power, beginning with person to person, one-on-one power. This is something every church needs. It is foundational to mission.
The current and traditional church mission focus is invitational. Build a building, open the doors on Sunday morning, and hope that people are curious enough during those few hours of the week to come to us. We sit in our big churches and wait. For decades we didn’t know how to do mission any other way. The tools to do a better job were out of reach, practically and economically. So we keep doing things the same way, rewarding the congregations that do this the best, despite the nagging realization that even the biggest churches are statistically ineffective.
To use Twitter, requires making an effort to unlearn and change this collective mindset.
How does Twitter differ from Facebook?
Twitter is beautifully stripped down. You must tell your story in less than 140 characters. Church people can respond to this limitation in one of two ways.
Protest! We can’t possibly tell our message in 140 characters.
Cheer! How hard can it be to write one sentence a day!
Twitter will be manageable for any pastor or any lay leader. It is possible to put Twitter to work with as little as 15 or 20 minutes of effort per day. That’s good news!
Advent is a big season for Lutherans and several other denominations that follow the liturgical year.
Frankly, for a lot of Christians it can be a big letdown. For years, Advent has been playing second or third fiddle to the big “C” (Christmas).
Advent is important to us. Why isn’t it important to everyone? What’s with the celebration of Christmas for five weeks and the meltdown on December 26? Every church goer knows December 25 is the first of 12 days of Christmas! Why are the Christmas trees out in the trash on Day 2!
What can we do about this?
We can wait every Sunday in Advent for the throngs to walk through our doors. We can be ready to welcome them and share our traditions. What are they again? Why do we light those four candles? Who is this Isaiah guy? And John the Baptist? Really!
We can go to the world.
Our Advent Tweet A Day is an attempt to share what is important to us with people beyond our membership. We’ll see together how that goes. But one thing we can guess. No one will follow us if all we do is talk about ourselves.
Meanwhile, here’s another idea. Instead of waiting for people to come to our congregations, what if we gathered our members and went to them. Try this! Get a group together and attend the local high school, middle school and elementary “winter” festivals. Maybe you have kids attending these schools. Maybe you don’t. That doesn’t matter.
The young people and their teachers worked hard on their music. These days many school groups are performing pretty professionally. Your group is likely to be noticed. You will have a chance to talk to others in the community.
Remember! It’s not about you. Just go and enjoy yourselves. Then write a blog article or two about it and start tweeting about your experience.
Make a habit of such community involvement. Check their web sites and subscribe if you can so that you know what’s happening.
You will start to notice more things about your community . . . and they might start to notice you, too.
Our community school concerts are next week. We can’t wait!
2×2 started as a blog. It is time to spread our little wings to other realms of social media!
2×2 has been blogging seriously for about 18 months. We started in February 2011. It took us a few months to get our bearings. Only one person visited our site that month! Our stats show that our readership didn’t break triple digits until July. From our many web visits to other church web sites we figure that’s about when most churches give up on social media. We kept at it! Patience!
Our best month of 2011 was November with 623 new readers that month.
By this time we were able to see growth patterns and we predicted that we would have 12,000 new readers visiting our blog in 2012. We should exceed that benchmark with ease.
Looking ahead to 2013, we can anticipate doubling 2×2’s reach. We are nearing 1500 new visitors a month and the growth has been steady. 110 people subscribe and have our posts go to their email every day. So that’s an additional 770 views each week! Our reach is truly worldwide.
2×2 achieved this without using any other social media platforms to enhance our SEO numbers. We followed just one strategy: Offer content that will be helpful to our mission audience — seekers and lay leaders.
We continue to be surprised by the many and strong relationships we are forming with other mission-oriented church workers, many of them not Lutheran. These are rewarding and growing. We started to introduce our readers to one another and now they are referring people to us. We look forward to many new things in 2013.
Which brings us back to our Advent project.
Research shows that Twitter is the least understood social media platform with the greatest potential to reach new audiences. Better than Facebook. There are others, too. But let’s tackle one at a time!
The biggest barrier to using Twitter is understanding its potential. That’s why we have chosen December as our month to experiment. We’ll take it step by step and report our progress.
We hope you will follow our experiment and perhaps join us and share your results. We’ll try to make it easy.
How about it!?
Sharing the Gospel—140 characters at a time!
Watch for our official invitation to join the experiment which should be posted Saturday afternoon — just in time for Advent 1.
Step 1: We just opened our account:
@2x2Foundation
This required us to have an email account. We opened a free account with Google.
Join Bishop Ruby Kinisa as she visits small churches "under cover" to learn what people would never share if they knew they were talking to their bishop.
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Contact Info
You can reach
Judy Gotwald,
the moderator of 2x2,
at
creation@dca.net
or 215 605 8774
Redeemer’s Prayer
We were all once strangers, the weakest, the outcasts, until someone came to our defense, included us, empowered us, reconciled us (1 Cor. 2; Eph. 2).
2×2 Sections
Where in the World is 2×2?
On Isaiah 30:15b
Be calm. Wait. Wait. Commit your cause to God. He will make it succeed. Look for Him a little at a time. Wait. Wait. But since this waiting seems long to the flesh and appears like death, the flesh always wavers. But keep faith. Patience will overcome wickedness.
—Martin Luther
