Jesse,

There were some interesting apps there. Your article puts a nice spin on looking at them from a church perspective.

I've been questioning what's appropriate in a church's "official" Twitter feed. It might vary from church to church, but it's a subset of the "person" vs "organization" concept on Twitter.

Twitter is primarily personal. People sign up to say things a person would say. Even as self-promotion, if it sounds human it works. Once it sounds churned out by a corporate machine, they've lost all credibility.

Sometimes people represent their companies. Comcast's Frank Eliason is still pretty much the poster boy for this. When he tweets, he's mindful that he represents Comcast, but he also includes some personal tweets and allows his personality to show through. It's successful because when he's done, the customer has been helped by an actual person and not a faceless corporation.

It's also possible for a corporate brand to succeed on Twitter. My first experience with this was when I tweeted a complaint about problems connecting to Hulu, and within minutes HuluSupport was following me, which allowed me to learn about the DNS error that had broken their service. Since then, I've seen a lot of companies use Twitter with varying degrees of success. What I don't like is when people start posting more "personal" type tweets from the corporate accounts they control. I think it's kind of creepy.

With that in mind, what would people want from their church's "official" Twitter feed? Here are some that I think are good:

• Words of encouragement, with or without scripture references.
• Reminders about upcoming events.
• Occasional messages generating buzz about those events. "The staff is excited after a big planning meeting."
• Brief announcements about new info landing on the church website, Facebook group, etc. With or without links. Shrink the URLs. Don't Tweet every new posting.
• Maybe the occasional TwitPic to go along with those.

I don't think it should be a fire hose of detail, including some of the more mundane things that might have gone on at the church today. I'd say save those for personal accounts. TweetCube looks interesting, but only for stuff you really want people to see. (I don't use Twitter as my podcast reader, so I don't need every sermon on Twitter.)

Unless your church membership is relatively young and tech-savvy, most of them aren't going to "get" Twitter. However, more and more people have wireless phone plans that include text messaging, and this is something that the church can leverage. Remember, you don't actually have to sign up on Twitter.com to use the service.

You could easily post something on your church website that says something like this:

Get updates on church info and events on your wireless phone. Just sign up at twitter.com and follow "myChurchName", or text "follow myChurchName" to 40404. (Twitter is a free service, standard text messaging rates apply, blah, blah, blah...)

So in summary, I think a church's Twitter feed should include information that would be well-received by people who are getting it as a text message and not necessarily using Twitter for any other purposes. I suspect that anything that fits this criteria would make for happy followers on the rest of Twitter, too.

Does this sound reasonable to anyone else? Have I missed something?

Micah

In an upcoming episode I'll be doing a review of Twitter for Churches... a new ebook. I'm a fan but an holding my opinion on execution for the time being. I'm not sure what my detailed opinion is yet. Still mulling this all over.