Have you ever twitter-complained?
With some companies, it’s the only way to get their attention! With some, they never seem to hear, do they?
I recently visited Six Flags over Georgia (it’s a theme park in the Atlanta area, and before you ask – don’t go) with my kids. It was a terrible experience in many respects. Think Disney – then consider the inverse – and you’ll have Six Flags over Georgia.
While I was searching the park for an open drink retailer, dumbfounded that on a 93-degree day in Atlanta virtually every drink station was closed, I tweeted my frustration.
I followed up with a second tweet, which has thus far proven to be correct:
Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms have become interesting, immediate feedback mechanisms for customer criticisms and complements. Like in life, there are 10 critical posts for most every compliment. Nevertheless, social media has provided everyone with a public megaphone, making it an important mechanism to both monitor and leverage.
At Watermarke Church, where I serve as Lead Pastor, we are ever learning to better leverage and monitor social media. It’s not enough to simply “favorite” or “like” posts that mention our church anymore. Social media platforms can provide all sorts of opportunities to engage and deepen relationships with our attendees (if you are a business leader, just call them customers).
Here are a few ways we are trying to use social media better, and one specific way I want to use it during our Sunday services soon:
1. Give, give, give, give … then ask.
At Watermarke, we traditionally used social media as another announcement medium. We had our Sunday bulletin, welcome and announcement segment in the service, pre-service videos, and email blasts, so our social media presence was simply an extension of this list. What we have learned is using social media purely for announcements and event invitations is a poor way to leverage this powerful medium.
Now, we are trying to leverage a new approach: Give, give, give, give – then ask. To give, we post helpful statements, tweet resources, post links to other content (give, give, give…), then, after giving first, we ask. Ask people to attend. Ask people to engage. The give first, ask second approach is brand new, but we have already seen engagement increase dramatically.
2. A new engagement platform.
Social media can help make a big church feel small. Sunday mornings for us are not an ideal connection point. Our church model is not built on Sunday School or other Sunday morning connections, so it is easy for an attendee to sit through a service without engaging with other people, our staff, or our church. Enter social media.
We recently leveraged Facebook for prayer requests:
The requests were great. But what made the post even better was the comments back to specific people and the likes, or in this case, an indication of a prayer for a request.
Also, social media is helping us reach beyond Sunday morning with our church. Through Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and even Pinterest, we can engage people through the week.
3. Always include an image and hashtags.
This is nothing new, but we ignored it for too long and it is vital to engagement. Photos get clicks and attention, and that’s important. Facebook has a sophisticated algorithm to determine if our posts are seen on pages. If you want your post to appear in a feed, you must find ways to make it engaging to your audience – likes, clicks, and shares. This both increases the posts presence AND changes how future posts will be treated.
Same for hashtags. They are important – and searchable.
Now, these three tips are making our social media presence more prominent, but I am also considering how we can leverage the real-time nature of social media in our services. Here is what I want to do, and I’d LOVE to hear from anyone who is doing this now.
4. Engage attendees in real-time.
Many people in our church are tweeting and posting during the service. So instead of ignoring this until the service is over, would it be possible to have people engaging with these posts DURING the service – in real-time? Better yet, is it feasible to answer a few questions tweeted from the crowd at the end of a sermon?
That’s what I want to try. I love the transparency and authenticity of unplanned, unrehearsed answers to real audience questions. As a preacher, we attempt to anticipate objections and questions and address them in the sermon, but we never get it completely right. What if we allowed for some live Q&A, through twitter (so it’s controlled), to end a message?
I bet somebody smarter than me has already figured this out and is doing it in the live environment. I’ve seen in done online after the message, but what about in the room with the live audience? That’s what I want to try.
Let me know if you have done this – I want to learn from your success and mistakes. And, what other tips would you give to enhance social media engagement?
Last thing: I’ve still not heard from Six Flags… Let’s all agree to be better than Six Flags.
