Exirus Creative: Houston Web Design and Multimedia Company

2. Engage in Social Media.

In this day and age, everybody and their mothers are getting involved in social media...whether it's Joanna the cashier at a mom and pop store in the corner, or Michael, a public relations professional at a big advertising agency in New York.

Social media is a platform that bridged the gap and made communication possible amongst individuals no matter what your social status in life is.

What is Social Media? Wikipedia defines social media as: online content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. Social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content; it's a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologues (one to many) into dialogues (many to many) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers. Social media has become extremely popular because it allows people to connect in the online world to form relationships for personal, political and business use. Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content (UGC) or consumer-generated media (CGM).

Now how do social media apply to church and why should you get involved?

Bottom line is church needs to be where there are people to reach. If businesses are capitalizing on such platform to increase their business, why shouldn't the church use it to expand their outreach?

According to Compete.com , Twitter had 19.4 million unique users in the U.S alone in April. Facebook , according to a Press Release, has over 250 million active users.

There is certainly a percentage of harvest field out there from amongst the millions and billions of social network users. People may not necessarily respond to your call for salvation (but then who knows what the Spirit may do?) online but you can plant the word of God and encourage people who might shy away from church or never been to church using these tools.

Going back to driving traffic to your church website, social networking websites usually allow you to create your profile and put a URL link.

In Twitter for example, you can create a short bio with 160 words or less but it also has a separate field where you can input your church's URL. Once you start following people, they usually follow you back.  Chances are they would want to check out your website to see what you're all about. So that's traffic right there.

From what I've heard, Google loves Twitter (I have not proven this myself yet). It supposedly boosts your search engine ranking for your particular keywords. Now if this is true, keep in mind that this is just one of the many steps in boosting your search engine rankings. Search engine optimization is not just all about Twitter. Google algorithm constantly changes. There are many factors involved and it constantly changes.

Another good social network site which has become significantly popular now more than MySpace is Facebook.

In Facebook, you can create a "Fan" page and invite people to become your fans.
You can use this tool to announce upcoming events, sermon series, new blog post, and other interesting items and link them back to your website - thus the traffic.

Social media is a powerful tool. However, the key is to know how to use it appropriately. Once you have created accounts in Twitter and Facebook, traffic will flow naturally if you provide valuable and interesting content to your followers and fans. 

To be continued...

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