LSW 8: Creating a Marketing Plan for a Ministry

The one thing I have learned repeatedly regarding this project (that I had neglected to recognize before) is that church and ministries must market. Though many do seek to increase their size, financial status, and reputation, ministries should be seeking to market their own assistance and resources to the public. By using social media, churches can gain the interests of their followers and in turn, meet their needs. I have found two articles that lay out both a general social media plan and a plan that is specific to Twitter for churches to follow. In the first article, “5 Step Plan for Social Media Ministry,” John Saddington reviews the fundamental basics that one should know both before and during their social media endeavors. The five steps include: Knowing your audience, choosing your platforms and people, do it, get off of the computer, and metrics. The article, though basic, suggests that the administrator do all of the aforementioned in order to maintain a successful social presence and through this, will yield knowledge of the community, congregation, traffic increases and decreases, relationships within the congregation, etc.

The next article, “A Social Media Strategy: Twitter” shares a more in-depth coverage of the reasons behind using Twitter to reach an audience and how it can be done. The part of the article that I found most engaging, however, was the part that was reserved for the author to give examples of their own personal “Twitter goals” for their ministry. They included: “Gain 300 followers a month with a target audience of active users who have similar interests and do not follow too many other people, Sponsor six Tweet chats through various partnering ministries, like YouthMin.or, and Make at least 50% of tweets some sort of free resource or conversation starter.” I found both of these articles to be great resources in creating a social media plan for my own campus ministry.

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