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We are always looking at the ever-changing landscape of technology, and we see some great things on the horizon for Church, Tech and future iChurch Books. Click Here for Part 1
We are always looking at the ever-changing landscape of technology, and we see some great things on the horizon for Church, Tech and future iChurch Books. Click Here for Part 2
After you have implemented a great social media strategy and have seen people respond and interact with you on your networks, it’s time to analyze your results, optimize your strategy and repeat. Many organizations don’t analyze their social media results; they take the approach of “just put it on Facebook or Twitter” and hope for the best. If your ministry takes the time to develop a social media strategy then it should take the time to measure the results.
Analyze Your Results
In order to effectively measure social media results you need to assess quite a few things such as:
• How many people are seeing the posts, tweets?
• How many people are sharing your posts, tweets?
• What is the demographic of your online audience (age, sex, location)?
• How many people are following your social media links back to your website?
• How many people are clicking on the links that you are posting?
• Who are your most important and influential followers?
These stats are measured and calculated by quite a few online software programs that your ministry should utilize. SproutSocial.com or SimplyMeasured.com are social media analytics companies that take your Facebook and Twitter profiles and provide analytics on your social media strategies. Facebook insights is the analytics section on Facebook Fan Pages that provides demographic information on your pages’ fans. Hootsuite.com is a great software that we spoke of earlier that helps manage social media strategies by scheduling posts to a variety of networks and it also has analytics reporting features that can help your ministry measure the effectiveness of your campaigns. Finally, Google Analytics has a Social Reporting feature that reports traffic that comes to your website from Social Media networks. This feature is called Google Social Media Analytics and it is very important in measuring the impact of your social media campaigns.
Optimize Your Strategy Looking at your social media analytics and comparing the data of what you posted, when you posted, how often you posted and which networks yielded which responses, we can now look at ways to optimize our results. First, you want to see which times people responded to your posts. On average this is between the hours of 7am – 11am and 6pm – 11pm. Next, you want to see which days garner the highest response, and more often than not this is Saturdays and Tuesdays. Additionally, as you optimize your strategy you want to continue to create and distribute visual content to your networks. Continue to find ways to create innovative and inspiring photos and videos that will engage your audience as well as compel them to share. If they are not sharing, liking, retweeting or commenting enough to your content, then add more calls to actions in your posts. Finally, utilize your hashtags on Twitter, Google+ and Instragram. Hashtags can help you create, get involved and control conversations that occur about your ministry as well as give you numerous opportunities to reach people where they are at and conduct ministry.
Repeat When you know better, you do better and knowledge is power! With that being stated, now that you have analyzed your results and optimized your strategy, it’s time to repeat. Repeat the process of posting to your social media networks at the optimized times with the optimized content to achieve optimized results.
I have had the great opportunity to work with Christian Leadership Alliance and Azusa Pacific University in creating as well as facilitating the Website and Social Media Ministry Course using The iChurch Method.
This 10 week course is designed to provide church leadership and tech staff with a better understanding of how to implement an effective online ministry presence. Give them a better understanding of how to create an effective ministry website and the benefits of it. The best ways to integrate multimedia into the church website and how to keep users engaged. How to implement online stores and online donation modules that create secure online transactions. How to provide inspiration, information and communication within the context of social media and take ministry to the people.
This online course can help your ministry go to the next level and better utilize your websites and social media networks. Sign up TODAY
Truly understand and absorb The iChurch Method messages and concepts through our Online School - The iChurch Academy!
Participants in The iChurch Method online school will enjoy a unique and informative set of courses that delve deep into the concepts presented in both volumes of The iChurch Method books (available for purchase online here – Vol. 1 – Vol. 2).
Although the books will give you the insights and information you need to help take your ministry online and global, many people prefer a more in-depth discussion to answer questions that may come up throughout the course of reading the book.
Each chapter of both Volume 1 and Volume 2 is broken down into a week-long course incorporating videos and additional concepts that will be examined in detail. The courses include not only a chapter by chapter review from an interactive book module, a PDF version of the book for viewing as well and instructional videos that walk participants through a more in-depth, detailed discussion of each concept that will really drive the message home! Of course, a quality course wouldn’t be complete without some Q & A, interactive webinars, group discussions and brief quizzes to be certain that everyone understands the concepts to assure there is no stone unturned.
Courses are at YOUR OWN PACE, there is no set time that they begin or end, it's entirely up to you. We suggest that each course take a week but if you want to move faster or slower, it's entirely up to you.
Get more from The iChurch Method volumes 1 and 2 by signing up for our Online Training Courses today! Dive into the concepts and prepare yourself to head down the path of building your ministry online with a global mindset and get your message out there today!
http://youtu.be/Stpi_4aXcPI
In this book we’re just basically building upon The iChurch Method Volume One. We’re taking every chapter to another level.
This book talks about how to take your website to another level, how to develop a good content strategy, how to utilize more up-to-date and current technological tools to build your website.
With multimedia we're looking at taking that to the next level, the whole entire internet church campus. Let's bring all the online video and the streaming into one coherent campus so that people can come interact with your ministry online.
With eCommerce we're looking at how you make more effective, more secure, and more streamlined online donation modules. How do you have a better and more effective online store.
With social media we're looking at the advancements and the rise of visual social media and how to utilize that with Facebook timeline, Pinterest, and Instagram. Social media is going entirely visual so we want to make sure that we address that.
Then we're looking mobile. In the last book we talked about mobile websites, it's time to talk about mobile apps and how to utilize those and tablets and all these new mobile devices that are coming down the line.
So, in this book we just want to help ministries take their ministry to another level online and continue to stay ahead of the technology trend.
Welcome to the iChurch blog. Here we will provide ministries with the tools and information to advance their ministries online. This blog is based on the book "iChurch: The New Internet Church" by Jason Caston. Oh, and for the record, I am Jason Caston.
Now let's answer the main question that everyone is asking, what is iChurch. Well if you Google "ichurch" you get a variety of results that range from a social network for Christian singles, an interactive viewing module for people to watch live services, to a few blogs talking about how the church is integrating technology into it's overall outreach. Most often, when a church says that they have an ichurch, it's the interactive viewer where you can watch live (and archived) services, donate, chat, take notes and read the online bible, all from one page. Now this is a great feature but it's limiting if that's all they consider an "iChurch experience".
I decided to write this book and start learning about the integration of technology and ministry because I had the great opportunity to work with some amazing mega churches and I started to see how they were lacking in terms of technology. But it wasn't just the implementation of technology (websites, ecommerce, computers) into the business of ministry, it was a general misunderstanding of how technology could be used to advance the kingdom and take the gospel worldwide.
Therefore, I decided to not only learn and stay updated on ALL new technologies that ministries can use to advance the gospel online, but I started to develop a methodology that ministries could follow to create a full online presence. This approach, which breaks down the iChurch method into 7 areas or building blocks, gives ministries a road-map to developing a full internet church presence. These seven areas, websites, multimedia, ecommerce, social media, mobile, elearning and virtual office, are the foundation of "iChurch: The New Internet Church" and this blog.
Welcome
