Facebook

Churches are increasingly investing more time into social media.  It can be a great way to connect with members, regular attenders and new folks in a place where people are already hanging out.  Whether you’re just getting started in social media or have been at it for awhile, here are three tips for avoiding a few common mistakes.

Don’t set it and forget it.  Launching a Facebook page or setting up a Twitter account is the easy part.  The challenge comes in keeping it up to date.  If...

In the church world, there are lots of things we do for the sake of communicating with first-time visitors.  We add snazzy “I’m New Here” buttons to our website.  We create slick brochures as part of a welcome packet.  Now there’s one more thing to add to the list: Facebook Timeline.

If your church has a Facebook page, you probably know about Timeline. It lets your page act more like a website home page.  You can add a big cover image to the top.  You can create milestones that talk about...

It was rumored for some time, but now it’s a reality.  Facebook has launched the Timeline feature for brand pages.  That includes your church’s page.  And whether it’s a change you like or not, Facebook will make the feature live and mandatory on March 30.  Leading up to that deadline, you can try things out without publically launching it until you’re ready.  And you can launch early; Church Juice has. So as you work on your timeline—even if you’ve already activated it—here are some of the...

Veteran Facebook users still log into Facebook, but they post less. 

That’s one of the findings from a study done by the digital consultant agency Beyond as they look to predict how people will use social media in the future.  And for me, it’s a great insight to why I, like some of you, have been feeling Facebook fatigue.

This idea also jibes with my personal experience lately.  While I don’t see friends posting as often, I do see them interact with the things I’m sharing.  So they’re not...

For the first time in my life, I’m down on Facebook.  I’ve always been a fan and staunch supporter.  I believe it has helped me better stay connected with friends than I ever would have without it.  I didn’t get upset over the various changes, privacy and layout, over the years.  I just liked Facebook.

That was until recently.  It seems like less and less of my closer friends are as active as they used to be.  Some are more involved, but it seems for me that Facebook isn’t providing me with...

There’s still plenty of debate in churches around the question of, “Is social media really relational?”  It’s probably a fair conversation to have as long as it’s not just an excuse to quickly dismiss using social media because it’s new or too hard to do.  But I’d like to layout my reasoning that social media is indeed relational.

In a recent interview with Christianity Today, Claire Diaz Ortiz, leader for social innovation at Twitter, talked about how social media makes perfect sense for...

You may not notice any visible changes with your church Facebook Page right now.  But the way your updates appear to your fans has already changed.  And soon, the appearance of your page will likely get a makeover, too.

First, let’s start by talking about how you share information with your fans.  The goal traditionally has been to get someone to Like your Page.  Once they hit that button, you were golden.  Updates appeared in their feed and life was good.  But when Facebook recently...

Recently, Facebook launched a pretty big new feature called Subscribe.  Here’s how Facebook describes it:

You've always been subscribed to friends. Now you can keep up with journalists, celebrities, political figures and other people you’re interested in too. You can get their public updates in your News Feed by going to their profile and clicking on the Subscribe button.

In essence it’s like an RSS feed that shows up in your Facebook feed and it changes how public figures can use...

You don’t need a Facebook page to be a growing successful church.  It’s true.  You also don’t need the biggest, awesomely feature-filled website either.  And you know what you really don’t need?  Twitter.

Those are probably the oddest few sentences I’ve written here at Church Juice especially when you consider how much time we dedicate to talking about using social media well or designing a great website.  But just having these tools won’t make you successful.  And guess what?  There are...

In the dark of the night, while Church Juice was asleep, our Facebook page magically loaded a map of our physical office location.  After weeks of canceling out of a request box to add our address, we saw that it just suddenly appeared on our page.  And while it’s a mystery to us how it happened—our leading theory is Mark Zuckerburg was up late on a programming binge that resulted in him taking a personal interest in Church Juice—the addition of our street address to our information did...