144 Hours = $2,000 or $97
I hate saying no to church ministries. I’m pretty sure you do, too. But, chances are, you are also living in the same reality as I am and the reality is that with only 24 hours in a day, there’s only so much you can do. As a media pastor, I spent countless hours making one-off promos and video spots for a one-time event or for a ministry need. I didn’t mind the work, but it sure didn’t come fast or easy. Then my friends at WorshipHouseMedia.com came along and created a one-stop-shop for any of us to get a video that would save us hours/days/weeks for just a few bucks thanks to the supply/demand side of capitalism.
But even that had its limitations, because when you needed dozens of different videos and elements the cart became expensive. Then I heard from a guy who took this Groupon idea and wrapped it around stuff churches would want and called it only144.com. In this particular instance, they’ve taken about $2,000 worth of video content and have worked out an insane bundle deal for 97 bucks. The catch is that it ends on Thursday, Feb 2nd at Noon.
See, that’s how they sorta made it like Groupon, but these deals only last 144 hours and won’t happen again for at least a year. So, when I heard about this one, I had to share it, even though it’s about halfway done.
I don’t know very many churches – even some of the really big ones – that wouldn’t want a ton of great video content (openers, bumpers, promos, etc.) – all made so that your church can use them – for $97. It’s a once-a-year kind of deal, so check it out before it ends on Thursday, February 2nd at Noon.
At $97 you’ll kick yourself if you end up doing another all-nighter working on another one-off video when you could have had a freakin’ library of them at your fingertips. Don’t be lame. Don’t kick yourself later. Be smart and take all the credit later. 
5 of 7 Crucial Elements of Social Media ROI for Churches
After a hiatus from blogging, I’ve continued this series.
To get anyone up to speed on the series, here are the first four parts:
Part 1 - “Know How Social Media Integrates the Vision of Your Church”
Part 2 - “Decide What’s Measurable and What’s Not”
Part 3 - “What is ROM?“
Part 4 - “Which Metrics Matter?“
And now, on to part 5.
Knowing what to measure and how to measure social media are well and good, but you’ll need tools to both capture and make sense of the information.To help you with the tools available today, I’m covering the 5th of 7 crucial elements of social media return on investment for churches: “Empower Every Ministry With Tools and Training”. Before I share a list of tools for social media measurement, let the words of Australian writer and critic, Robert Hughes, give needed perspective:
“A determined soul will do more with a rusty monkey wrench than a loafer will accomplish with all the tools in a machine shop.” – Robert Hughes
Your determination and focused effort with even a few freely available tools will help you gain more insight than a casual use of the venerable juggernaut software tools for measuring social media ROI.
Free Social Media Measurement & Analytic Tools
For many churches, the two main social media platforms used are Facebook and Twitter, which both include some level of built-in tools for understanding your interaction with others and how/when your content is viewed and shared. Facebook includes Insights, a simple dashboard view that shows some surprisingly helpful information about Fan Pages.
Facebook Demographics from a Fan Page
As the example above demonstrates, it’s helpful to know which demographic groups are interacting with your site and which are not. From this, you can decide how you want to alter your content to reach the demographic user groups you desire. Facebook has a page about Insights (just type in Facebook Insights on the Facebook search) that helps get new users up-to-speed quickly, and is written in a conversational tone, making it easy to understand.
“When you create compelling content, people may choose to interact with the material by commenting, liking, or writing on your Wall. These people help to spread your content virally throughout Facebook, as their engagement leads to organic stories being published in their friends’ News Feed.”
In addition to demographics information, Facebook Insights also gives you:
- Post views
- Post feedback
- Page content feedback
- Daily story feedback
- Page posts
- Daily page activity
- Page views
- Tab views
- External referrers
- Media consumption stats
Similarly, Twitter provides some basic measurement tools right from the web browser interface.
However, the big Kahuna of metrics is Google, with their freely available Google Analytics. The data, trends, insight and helpful information about any website you own/manage is tremendous! The tricks that Facebook uses to provide up-to-date information and then offer to sell you ads that fit your likes is straight from the Google playbook. While there are many applications that track and look at data in unique and interesting ways from your websites, the obvious starting point should be Google Analytics.
Social Media Metrics & Helpful Tools
As good as Google, Facebook and Twitter are independently from each other, there have been a growing number of specialized apps and web tools built to tie social media analytics into a single interface. If you are serious about getting the best ROM out of Social Media for your church and/or ministries, then you will need to invest time (and probably at least some money) into a robust tool.
Right up front, I want to say that I think there are two broad categories for these social media tools: Social Media Engagement and Social Media Monitoring & Engagement.
Social Media Engagement Tools
Simple and free tools abound for helping users streamline their social media activities. I only have one recommendation here: TweetDeck. What started as a Twitter third-party app has greatly expanded to include multiple accounts across multiple social media networks, including Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Posting or scheduling posts and status updates across multiple networks and even from more than one account is a great value of TweetDeck, making all-in-one updates simple. Additionally, TweetDeck allows for multiple ways to organize the never-ending stream of information and updates. From viewing only replies to a specific account to simple searches for a term, name, tag or phrase, the desktop and mobile versions of this tool are very effective and easy to use. Even better, it’s possible to sync the user information between multiple devices, making for a much more useful tool than separate desktop and mobile installations.
I still use TweetDeck daily, even though I also use some of the tools below. It’s just that good.
Social Media Monitoring & Engagement Tools
From free programs like HootSuite to low-cost subscription services like SproutSocial to high-end, “you-complete-me” tools such as Radian6, there’s no shortage of options for taking a deeper dive into the metrics, analytics and measurement of your social media effort and networks.
Where TweetDeck stops at making it simple or organize and coordinate social media updates, these tools allow for the capture, display and analysis of your social media trends at or near real-time.
I’ve tried quite a few including SproutSocial, MeltWaterBuzz and, what I think is easily king-of-the-hill, Radian6.
SproutSocial provides attractive, easy-to-understand, useful information for most churches to find valuable
A step up in complexity and deeper data mining is Meltwater Buzz (seen below). This is view of some screens taken from crunchbase.com to show the kind of visual data available for analysis.
Meltwater Buzz is a much deeper toolset with not only more data, but helpful tracking and engagement tools
The game changes when you step up to a tool like Meltwater Buzz (shown above) or Radian6 (shown below). Both are very robust tools that help share the workload between a team of social media specialists and have very helpful tools for aggregating and assigning follow-up engagement tasks.
Radian6 provides incredible detail about metrics, measurement, sentiment and analytics reporting
In my opinion, most churches will do just find with Facebook Insights and welcome the additional helpfulness of a tool like SproutSocial. For the minority of churches that are very, very proactive and responsive in their social media activities, the step up to enterprise-grade software is a wise investment. For those with a very wide reach and large influence, as well as the strategic and tactical needs to staff up a social media team, I simply must recommend the top-notch Radian6 software and team. From the top down, this is a very bright and classy group of people.
4 of 7 Crucial Elements of Social Media ROI for Churches
We’re half-way through this series! Today’s post is probably the most important of the bunch. Here’s the links to the three previous posts:
Part 1 - “Know How Social Media Integrates the Vision of Your Church”
Part 2 - “Decide What’s Measurable and What’s Not”
Part 3 – “What is ROM?“
Which Metrics Matter?
This is a long post because it encompasses so much. Therefore, I’m going to give you the answers now and then clarify them below. Ready?
Good metrics are measurements against your goals. Any other kind of measurement is potentially true, but irrelevant.
Build social media metrics from existing references of data. In other words, find a correlation & track it.
The metrics you gather are only as useful as the insights you can apply from them.
Metrics are indicators; over time, they reveal trends.
Here’s the truth: there is no “standard” set of measurement that everyone uses. Your metrics should only consist of that which you value and track.
Metrics Against Goals
Good metrics are measurements against your goals. Any other kind of measurement is potentially true, but irrelevant. Social media isn’t just about numbers, it’s more about reach. Having 5,000 followers on Twitter or 800 friends on Facebook isn’t all that hard to achieve; simply follow thousands and friend hundreds and a fair number of people will reciprocate.
That kind of numeric growth has little value because it doesn’t give you real influence over those people. In fact, since they don’t have a real relationship with you, any updates you make are simply more noise for them to filter out.
Numeric Growth vs. Relevant Reach
Numbers alone are a poor indicator of influence in social media. You must cut through the clutter, have targeted and purposeful content that’s delivered with consistency. Doing just these basic things nearly guarantees some level of growth and reach. However, there’s a difference between reach and relevant reach.
Amber Naslund is one of the brightest minds in social media. She is a renowned speaker, author and thought leader. Amber is the VP of Social Strategy for Radian6, which is in my opinion the ultimate social media monitoring and analytics tool. She has defined relevant reach as: having focus, efficiency and impact.
“You want to expend the effort of growing both the size of your audience as well as the density of its overall relevance to your work.” – Amber Naslund, VP of Social Strategy, Radian6
We’re not against growing your social media fans and followers. If you’re creating valuable content and engaging in meaningful dialogue, you will increase your reach numerically as a natural by-product. What people like Amber and myself are saying is that you must have great intentionality in order to grow a large network with relevant reach.
(Note: I’ll be talking about measurement tools, including Radian6, in my next post.)
Start with What You Know
Build social media metrics from existing references of data. In other words, find a correlation & track it.
What kind of data are you currently keeping track of? Web site visits? Number of emails opened/bounced/click-through rate? Number of event registrations? Any data that gives you helpful metrics about how people are communicating with your church and/or responding to those various forms of communication are potentially helpful because they’ll give you insights into the kind of content and which demographics respond to certain kinds of communications.
With social media, you do have another communications medium and, as such, you can make it part of your communications strategy. That includes measuring using tools in Facebook (such as Insights) as well as Google Analytics to track how links to/from Facebook and/or Twitter and/or Google+ perform. Over time, you’ll begin to understand what “gets traction” with certain demographics, at which times of day and through which channels.
Remember, social media is one of your channels of communications, but it surpasses more impersonal channels because of the relational nature of the toolset.
You should already have an editorial calendar to determine which ministries are communicating to various groups of members and visitors. Too much information or unregulated communications from multiple ministries isn’t information; it’s spam. In the same way, abusing social media as a massive megaphone is like vomiting on your audience. Build a social media calendar and make it part of your information & communication strategy.
Metrics for Insights
The metrics you gather are only as useful as the insights you can apply from them.
Data is just data unless it can prove or reveal useful information and trends. Too much data = information paralysis. While it may be interesting to track the number of times a quote from the pastors’ message was re-tweeted, what insight does that provide? If you’re looking to find how many of the followers are re-tweeting the pastor, it might be helpful to know how relevant their reach is (number of followers who re-tweet their re-tweet). That’s basic measurement to gain some insight. However, I want you to think past the obvious.
Thinking Ahead
What if the weekend message had life application points spread throughout the talk that referenced how the pastor will be expanding on each of those Monday through Friday on the church Facebook Fan page? For example, if the message is about having a teachable spirit (based on Proverbs 12:1) and there are 5 Characteristics of a Teachable Spirit (hat tip to pastor Jimmy Evans), then leave people wanting a bit more by saying you’re going expand on each of those through a Facebook note or a blog post with some life application people easily try each day. Then, prepare ahead of time how you’re going to promote and share the content. For example:
- In the message, mention the church Facebook page.
- Add a link and reminder in the bulletin.
- Put a link to the Facebook page on the church website; add a link by the sermon audio, video & PDF files.
- Tweet the link (using a shortening service like Bit.ly to track the click-throughs) from the church & pastors’ accounts.
- Send an email out on Monday early in the morning to land in the congregants email with a reminder (and a link). On Friday’s email, promote the upcoming sermon and provide an invite link to send to their friends.
These proactive planning creates trackable data. This, in turn, provides a set of metrics to begin tracking over time (establishing a baseline). The insights from these metrics help you in the creation, content and targeting for future campaigns.
Rinse, Repeat, Look for Trends
Metrics are indicators; over time, they reveal trends.
If you’ve not realized it yet, I want to point out that this is work and probably requires more time than you’ve ever considered giving towards social media. It’s lots of consistent work, over a long period of time, with tweaking and testing, that will yield the kind of results that make measuring social media ROI worthwhile. It’s hard. It takes time. It requires consistency. It makes you define your objective, tweak your goals, modify your strategies and change your tactics for realistic expectations. Most of all, it requires a commitment.
“You must inspect what you expect. If you, or your manager, is not willing to define expectations clearly, you will in no way be able to determine your ROI for social media.”
One last quote from my friend Amber Naslund. She has a word about measuring social media ROI that is worthy of capturing & memorizing:
“Measuring success can be different than ROI. You can have successful outcomes that are not measurable in terms of dollars.” – Amber Naslund, VP of Social Strategy, Radian6
How is your church defining the role, goals and metrics of social media? What insights, learning and surprises have you found about using social media for yourself and your church?
I'm Anthony Coppedge, a follower of Jesus, a husband to my uber-bride and father to four great kids. I help ministries leverage technology and communicate with a digitally-infused culture. I'm passionate about this, so that makes me a Technology & Communications Evangelist. I attend and volunteer at Gateway Church in Southlake, TX and love it!
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