A lot of what we focus on here at Church Marketing Online is reaching out to share the Gospel and bring people into your church.  But it is also important to reach out to those who are already in your church.

I’ve seen many a church who did some great work in outreach and were bringing in lots of new people, but the church never seemed to grow.  The reason was that they were doing such a poor job with their existing members that people were leaving as fast as new people were coming.  Not good.

There are many elements to keeping people as members of a church. Read more…

A couple weeks ago I wrote about faking social media.  Generally speaking, it’s best to avoid faking social media and, instead, work on creating real connections with people.  This is especially important for the church.  But just because you shouldn’t totally fake your church’s social media presence, doesn’t mean there aren’t some tools you can use to make things easier and more efficient.

Here are 5 tools which can make you more effective at social media and save you time: Read more…

I was reading an article over at MickMel.com entitled, “You Can’t Fake It On Social Media“.  The thrust of the article is that for social media to work for an organization, you must actively engage with people through social media.  You can’t fake it.  But is that really true?  Can you fake it? Read more…

The other day, I posted about a video of Kelsey and the miraculous story of her birth.  You can view the video here.  This is an amazing story, but also a great example of how taking a few minutes to setup sharing buttons on content can make a huge difference in how much your content is shared. Read more…

Social media is a revolution.  At no other time in history has a message or news about an event or even video of that event been able to be spread to so many people so quickly.  Consider the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

Within 12 hours of the quake, there were over 4.5 million related Facebook posts from every continent (except Antarctica).  Millions of people posted to Twitter with the rate of related tweets getting to over 1,200 tweets per minute.  Within a few days there were over 9,000 earthquake related videos posted to YouTube and over 7,000 tsunami related videos.

From Death to Life: Read more…

Social media is huge these days.  Facebook has about 600 million members (that’s nearly twice the entire US population), Twitter has somewhere around 150 million users, and some are even suggesting that search engines will eventually be replaced by social networking (we’ll see).  So, do you think the church needs to be involved in social media? Read more…

The folks at the Center for Church Communications are hosting a webinar with some ideas for Pastors on creating a social media strategy for your church called, “Social Media for Pastors and Ministry Leaders: Where Do I Start?”.  The webinar is scheduled for Friday (tomorrow) at 11am PDT.  You can find out more and sign up for the webinar at: Read more…

Last week Paul Steinbrueck (of OurChurch.Com) and Chris Walker (of EvangelismCoach.org) hosted a webinar about how pastors and church planters can use social media in their ministries.  They have now made the video of that webinar available for anyone to watch.  It’s a great free resource and I encourage you to check out, “Social Media for Pastors and Church Planters”

http://blog.ourchurch.com/2011/03/11/social-media-for-pastors-and-church-planters-webinar-video-slides-and-resources/

What did you learn from the webinar?

What social media strategies have you found work best for your church?

Do churches need their own social network?  Church Marketing Sucks asked their readers and found out what church members think about that question. Read more…

Alright, so you’ve decided that your church should have a blog and you’ve chosen who will manage the blog (or blogs) and what the blog will be about. But your job isn’t over yet. Now you need to get people to read the blog. So, how to do you distribute and promote your blog to make it successful not only within your church, but also as a church marketing tool? Read more…