April 17th, 2007
Have You Heard of Twitter?
Posted by Church Video Ideas under Blogs, Communication, Continuing Education, Ideas, Intros and Announcements, Web 2.0A couple of months ago, Bill Seaver of MicroExplosion told me about Twitter - it was about the time he told me of MySliceOfPi. Bill is the man with Web 2.0 stuff.
Bobby Gruenewald of LifeChurch.tv recently blogged about Twitter. I’ll post what he wrote, as he has more experience using Twitter for ministry purposes…
Twitter is a free online “micro-blogging” service that allows you to post short updates (text based and limited to 140 characters) via SMS, instant messaging, the twitter.com website or several applications designed for the service. –wiki–
We used the service a few weeks ago in conjunction with a three day fast that we did as a church. Over the three days…Chris Spadlin who taught a message about fasting the previous weekend sent out “updates” about the fast via the twitter service throughout the day. People could subscribe using SMS (text messaging) on their cell phones, via instant messaging or by visiting the LifeChurch.tv website where we could pull in an RSS feed of the updates. It is currently completely free…except for the charges that a person might normally have for receiving SMS messages.
Twitter is a platform for SMS applications and it doesn’t cost the thousands of dollars it typically takes just to get started.
Here are some possible uses for your churches/ministries:
- Have users subscribe to your twitter feed via SMS and send out a weekly thought/prayer/mico devotional
- Use twitter to allow people to signup for activities/events (this definitely require some programming on your end, but will work)
- Have people subscribe to a special twitter feed to be reminded of an event or church experience/service via SMS
- Create an interactive element where people can SMS during a worship experience/service and incorporate the feed of all of the responses into the experience in real-time
- Allow people to subscribe to the feed of a mission trip leader as he/she sends out updates throughout the day of what God is doing through the trip
April 17th, 2007 at 10:47 am
Yeah, I had heard about it but never really joined until last week. Its actually pretty cool and were working on using it for our youth ministry. Great post, and I just have to say, great minds think alike
April 17th, 2007 at 11:13 am
[…] I finally signed up for a Flickr account, seeing how my last three posts were images and I’m wanting to see more use with my digital camera. Plus, who isn’t using it. It also flows well with my Virb account, and so I figured it would be a smart move. I also just bought a 2 year “Flickr pro” account for my sister’s birthday (a late, but well thought out gift
Shes a photo person and does a great job of uploading all her pictures to Myspace and Facebook. It just makes sense to have them all in one location? Am I right? I think its a great gift! I also signed up for twitter as well, and I can say I’m really looking forward to one universal login for the internet. Its pretty tough juggling all of these accounts. Lets see, I have a Myspace, Virb, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Google Account (RSS, GMail, Homepage, etc…), Youtube, and a Blog. And I know I’m even missing a couple… One side of me feels overwhelmed with all the user names and passwords, while the other side is rejoicing that I’m catching up. All I know is I’m already thinking of the possibilities of using these tools for ministry! […]
April 17th, 2007 at 11:37 pm
I am just loving the idea of having people text messages during a worship gathering and let that be a live part of the message. I don’t even know how that would play out, but it just seems wonderful. How neat would it be to be preaching and have a way for people to ask questions without disturbing anyone. It seems like a great way to give a voice to people who might never get a voice in your typical worship gathering.
If you come up with some practical ideas on this I would love to hear them!
October 29th, 2007 at 12:57 pm
[…] See more technical applications of using Twitter […]
November 28th, 2007 at 9:12 pm
[…] See more technical applications of using Twitter […]