FeedMagnet

You'd have to be hiding under a rock to not see the impact social media has had on our society. Tweets, blogs, YouTube videos - user generated content is popping up everywhere. You almost can't even watch the evening news without seeing content generated - not by professionals in the news media industry - but by every-day people.

While the impact of social media can be seen across many aspects of society, the church has been slow to adapt. Some pastors are blogging - or even tweeting - which is great, but kind of misses the point. Rather than bringing the congregation in to the conversation, it just provides another platform for pastors to stand on and push out a message.

FeedMagnet was designed to help organizations tap in to the power of social media - not by making it easier to tweet or providing analytics to track what people are saying - but by tapping into the content stream being generated by the masses and using it to further engagement and promote dialog.

Here are a few ways to get started using FeedMagnet for your church:

Make your services participatory

Often, church services are a place where a lots of Christians gather to hear from just a few Christians. The few talking to the many. Pastors long to have more involvement from church members - but how can they create an experience at church services and events that promotes participation?

One way is through social media. Powered by tools like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube, social media has democratized communication and changed the way people interact with each other and the way they expect to engage with the organizations they are part of.

Churches can use this new platform to provide a voice to church members and attendees. Imagine walking into a church service with a question from the pastor on the screen and a stream of answers coming from the congregation displayed below it. More that just opening up the dialog to participation from the room, the comments that go by can promote small pockets of conversation with people sitting near each other. The pastor can use the comments to color the sermon. And the whole thing creates a more participatory and engaging experience. And to ensure the quality of the content, FeedMagnet includes advanced filtering, moderation, and blacklisting controls that let you block words, phrases, or entire user accounts from interrupting the discussion with off-topic or disruptive messages.

If you attended the Verge 2010 conference, you saw this in action. In between sessions and out in the halls of the church facility where the conference was held, live updates from conference attendees were shown on dozens of displays.

» More on how FeedMagnet was used at the Verge conference

Engage your congregation and community throughout the week

If you do have pastors and lay leaders blogging, tweeting, and posting photos and videos to social sharing sites, one of the primary objectives of that activity should be to engage church members and the community in the conversation. Just using the tools to post comments and teaching sound bites is missing the point of social media. Instead, social media should be used to ask questions, foster discussion, and encourage interaction.

The same model described for church services above can be implemented online - on the church website. Imagine a community page that offers a question or update from church leadership and pulls in a live stream of content from the church and the community in response. This can provide a channel to get feedback on topics for church programs or just engage in thought-provoking discussion throughout the week.

Highlight the social media efforts of your leaders

If you have multiple church leaders posting content to various sites - blogs, Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, etc - there is no way to view all of that content in once place. You may struggle to keep updated content on the church website - yet you have church leaders posting to social sites about church a throughout the day.

FeedMagnet lets you pull that content directly in to the church website. More than just pulling in all of the pastor's Twitter feeds, it has intelligent filtering to let you only pull in content if it is relevant to the church. In other words, we can filter out the "Headed to the lake for a relaxing day" posts and include the "Studying the Word to get ready for Sunday's sermon" posts.

And updates don't have to be limited to staff. You can load in a list of dozens or even hundreds of blogs, Twitter accounts, Flickr galleries, and other sources from all of your church leaders - small group leaders, volunteers, etc. This gives you the opportunity to elevate the community of people who make the church possible, putting their content directly on the church website and helping them feel more involved.

For smaller churches - or those that have a more minimalistic approach to the web - FeedMagnet can provide the entire content stream for the website. Just set your home page to a content stream pulling in videos, blog posts, tweets, and other content generated by your church and posted across the web. It updates in real time lets you use the tools you know rather than having to learn and manage a complicated content management system.

Getting started

We're offering special pricing - starting at just $24/month - for churches and non-profits. You can't sign up online for that pricing yet, but you will be able to soon. In the mean time, just get in touch with us to get set up - we're ready to start working with your church today.

» Contact us to get signed up