Our church is starting a new sermon series at the beginning of February called Life’s Healing Choices. The sermon series is going to last 10 weeks, with each week covering a different life choice.
And for the first time, certainly in our churches history, we are going to be using our Facebook fan page to hold a live, on going bible study.
This live conversation stream can be used by anybody, any time of the day or night, and you just need to login via Facebook to participate!
Facebook Fan Pages are an amazing communication and collaboration platform. The ability for an organization to broadcast messages, and then for recipients of that message to interact and comment, has never been easier.
There are a lot of different organizations, groups, products, and high profile individuals that have found value and are benefiting from a Facebook Fan Page.
But one of the most effective ways I see a Facebook Fan Page being utilized is by a church. The benefits are huge and multi-dimensional, so I thought I’d write out some of the ways that I see how a church could benefit from a Facebook Fan Page.
Here are 5 ways I see that a church can use a Facebook Fan Page:
Facebook Fan Pages & Ministry
One of the most exciting places I’ve had the honor of working with Facebook Fan Pages is with our church! I’m always intrigued by the way businesses, Hollywood stars and other brands use Facebook Fan Pages. But the church (any church) just seems to have the right chemistry to leverage Facebook Fan Pages in some dynamic and exciting ways that other “brands” can’t.
One of the ways a church can use a Facebook Fan Page – and how our church is using them – is by creating a Facebook Fan Page for each major ministry and group within the church.
Our church has recently created a Facebook Fan Page and I have to say that we are all quite amazed with what’s happening so far.
First let me say that we have not done any promotions for the Facebook Fan Page. No banners in the bulletin, no announcements during service, nothing…
The only way people are finding out about our churches Facebook Fan Page is through “word of mouth” marketing (viral marketing) through Facebook itself.
There are people who go to the church, and / or who work at the church, who have told their friends on Facebook about the Fan Page.
And then there are those who are interacting on the Facebook Fan Page and in turn, broadcasting that interaction to all of their friends and so indirectly promoting the churches fan page (again, viral marketing).
A huge opportunity might be unfolding
I’ve been writing quite a bit here about our churches experience with Facebook Fan Pages.
And I’m happy to announce that we’ve now evolved beyond just the main church Facebook Fan Page, and we’re now launching pages for each ministry.
Just last night I finished linking the children’s ministry page and the youth ministries’ page to the main church page.
I just wanted to quickly write about our churches’ Facebook Fan Page and how it, along with an iPhone, i’s being used to keep everyone updated back here in the states.
Typically you’d have to wait for the missions team to return, get all their photographs together, and wait to hear testimonies from the members to get updated on how their trip went.
So we launched an new Facebook Fan Page for our church.
I’ve seen a lot of fan pages for churches across the web, but ours is unique, with a unique set of challenges.
1) We thought we wanted multiple key leaders in the church to all have admin access to the Facebook Fan Page. Our reasoning is that these key leaders would need admin access to send out pertinent information to all the fans of the FB page.
However, we noticed that once we made someone an “admin” to the Facebook Page, they immediately lost their profile image and everything they were doing was with the Fan Page image.
