Best practices and Twitter resources specifically for churches, as presented via The City Conversations by @thecity on May 3, 2011

1. Twitter “Cheat” Sheet
Best Practices
How does Twitter fit into a church’s communication strategy?
 Content spreads faster on Twitter than anywhere else
 Twitter does one thing well: shares life – personal life and church life
o Share your life – family, struggles, and passions
o Share your church life – content, events, stories, and conversations
 Tweets should hook people in to your deeper content (i.e. sermons)
How to determine what to tweet?
 Take your leaders’ lead for tone and direction
 Be discerning and listen to the Spirit (yes, even for Twitter)
 Glean what you can from interactions with your followers
 Go with your gut
 Glance at social media articles and consider how/if it applies to your feeds
Pastor Accounts vs. Church Accounts
Should lean more personal Should lean more ministry/content
Personalities are more compelling – people want Easier to have multiple people on a Church account
to hear things about you and then about your content
Remember:
Pastor accounts and Church accounts serve different purposes
Discern boundaries for each stream
Tips
 Keep your tweets under 120 characters if you want someone to re-tweet it
 Ask questions and engage with responders
 Attach links and/or photos
Best times to tweet:
 Around 9:00am – good for content pieces to interact with throughout the day
 Around noon – good for quick notes (especially Wednesdays)
 3:00-5:00pm
 Late night – good for videos
 Don’t schedule for whole-hour (ex. 9:00am) to keep it from obviously looking scheduled
Hashtags (#):
 Imply a series – if something is tagged with #something, there must be other things with that tag
 Keep your hashtags to under a dozen characters or so, and make it easily identifiable
Twitter “Cheat” Sheet provided by The City, Mars Hill Church, and Heinz Marketing
Follow us @TheCity, @PastorTimSmith, and @HeinzMarketing

2. Tips Con’t
Basic Rules for Attracting Re-tweets:
 Is it about Jesus? Or, does it proclaim some aspect of the gospel?
 Tweet like you talk – tease the meat of the content: “You could have God! And you chose light beer. [link]”
 In general, Twitter likes the pithy and punchy, but be mindful of your audience and be more careful with tone in
a church feed than you would in general.
 Would you RT it yourself?
Tools & Resources
 Social Media Dashboards – Hootsuite.com, Tweetdeck.com, Cotweet.com, UberSocial.com – schedule/posts
tweets, Facebook posts, etc. and follow conversations on multiple social media platforms
 Timely.is – publishes tweets when they'll have the highest impact
 Bit.ly – Shorten links and tracks how many people click on your link
 TweetAdder – search for and follow individuals based on location, keywords, etc.
 Klout – measure your relative Twitter influence (also helps with Google search rankings)
Twitter “Cheat” Sheet provided by The City, Mars Hill Church, and Heinz Marketing
Follow us @TheCity, @PastorTimSmith, and @HeinzMarketing