A 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