Just like we often clean the house before a special event, we also want our digital church home to be tidy. With your website and social media, going into fall is a good time to make certain that essential house-keeping tasks are taken care of for your website. Though not as exciting as creating special materials for special events, these tasks are essential for a church to have the most basic credibility. Some of these for social media overall include:
Updated and complete bios of your staff
People want to know who your leaders are their background, education, why they do what they do. In an age when almost all business leaders have Facebook pages, blogs, Twitter accounts and almost everything else you can imagine for maximum exposure, for your church leaders to not have at least an updated and complete bio on your website does not communicate a positive image of your staff.
Updated links to staff blogs, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts.
Visitors today expect to get to know church leaders through social media. If the church leader is not able to do this for him or herself, as is often the case when the leader is a baby-boomer who went to seminary before the days of the personal computer, assign a "web buddy" or editor, or co-writer to update or create this content. This is a wonderful expression of how we can serve and support one another in the church. It is important to be honest about this. This is also a good time to drop links if the staff person isn't using them.
Church Facebook pages should be more than photo albums
Yes, it's very nice to have pictures of your latest fun event, but if you don't also have some commentary about what's going on, why you do what you do, and have comments that make it clear the material is for people outside the church, your church Facebook page will look like an insider photo album only for the people already attending. In the same way that you need captions for pictures for them to make sense to anyone besides the person who takes them, you need captions on the Facebook images you share.
Your website also needs some house-keeping and following are some suggestions for that:
