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.

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Social Media & Churches: Stuck In Tactical

Facebook page? Check.

Twitter account? Check.

Doing more than posting status updates or re-tweeting the pastor? Uhhhhmm…

Those are all good actions and activities, but as checklists go, they’re simply tactical. That’s motion without progress; or, if there is progress, how can you know if it’s in the right direction or getting the right results?

The 30/50/20 Rule I outlined for pastors in my previous post is partially tactical, but it’s built around the idea that pastors will start to see value (ROtI – return on their time investment, which is minimal) through conversations. However, to fully take advantage of Social Media is to see beyond the actions and tasks and engage the individuals using these near real-time technologies.

7 Crucial Elements of Social Media ROI for Churches

I will briefly touch on these, as it’s too much information to put into a single blog post.

1) Know How Social Media Integrates the Vision of Your Church

2) Decide What’s Measureable – and What’s Not

3) Define ROM (Return On Ministry)

4) Which Metrics Matter?

5) Empower Every Ministry with Tools & Training

6) Drive People to Decisions

7) Share Success Stories

Having a strategy for your church’s social media efforts goes beyond the tactical and produces a plan to do something with the opportunity. Deciding to measure the return on investment (mostly, time, since churches are not selling product or service) will take time, effort and above all, consistency. However, the results can be very impressive when a strategy is employed.

Learning from the business world helps give context to this kind of dedication, consistency and effort. The folks over at MarketingSherpa polled 3,342 consumer and B2B (Business-to-Business) marketers, giving us valuable insights about how these firms are using social media to engage audience, build brand, generate leads and drive sales. Based on the survey results, the overall average ROI reported by those who are measuring it is 95 percent. One-quarter said they have achieved 100 percent ROI. Higher percentages were reported, too. Twelve percent said they have achieved 200 percent ROI; two percent reported 1,000 percent ROI.

While local churches aren’t looking to generate sales, they are interested in connecting with their communities (loosely translated as “leads” in the business world). The principle here is the point: a consistent social media strategy will yield results.

How is your church approaching social media? With a more tactical or strategic mindset? What have been your success stories and learnings?

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Why Mobile Technologies Will Force Churches to Change

There have only been a handful of technologies that fundamentally changed how churches function on a day-to-day basis: Electricity, Central A/C & Heat, Telephones, the Internet, Email and, most recently, mobile technologies. I believe that mobile technologies will eventually force churches to change from a “come to us on our terms and our location” mindset to one that says “we’re available to meet you wherever you are”. In order to help churches embrace this change, I’ve outlined some of the reasons why I believe this change is coming – and coming faster than most realize.

More Than a Phone

Some would argue that mobile- and smart-phones are merely an extension of the telephone, but I believe the familiarity of the phone aspects cloud the bigger, and inherently better, value of mobile technology. A telephone was only ever a phone, though it did act as a transport medium for faxes and dial-up Internet connections.

Mobile devices, on the other hand, have redefined nearly every communication and transactional interaction of our lives.

The research firm comScore released their 2010 Mobile Year in Review report and revealed some very interesting and telling trends that, I believe, will bring a tidal wave of change upon nearly every local church. The report highlighted the increasing functionality in mobile phones. One of the fastest-growing uses of mobile devices? Online banking & online giving. “The U.S. mobile market displayed the most mature mobile banking market reaching 11.4% of mobile users,” cited the report. In addition, mobile wallet capabilities – using mobile phones in place of debit or credit cards for in-person purchases – are beginning to come onto the scene. The report cited the example of Starbucks, which, in early 2011, announced that “customers in thousands of locations can pay for items with their phones via an application that can be scanned across a reader at check out.”

People are using the near-constant availability of their mobile devices to connect and share instantly; a facet of digital life that the local church must embrace.

For example, 24.7% of U.S. mobile users access social networking sites or blogs on their mobile device, showing the continued rise of online connectivity. With 93% penetration in the U.S., mobile reach has connected the vast majority of Americans, with 2.26 trillion (yep, with a ‘t’) minutes of cell phone calls logged and 1.81 trillion text messages sent in 2010 alone. Further, 24.5% of U.S. households are now wireless-only.

This kind of saturation leads to one obvious conclusion: we have the ability to find, connect, communicate, share and purchase from anywhere at anytime.

Mobile Usage Intersects with Life in Churches

As mobile devices continue to sell at unprecedented rates, the increasing usage to an ever-widening user group has certain categories showing massive double-digit growth.

In the not-too-distant past, churches could pretty much get by with a “build-it-and-they-will-come” mentality. Today, churches can’t assume their venues, activities and events will be the hub of people’s spiritual lives. Remember when:

• New to town & looking for a church? Go to the street with all the church signs & try one.
• Want to share life with those who share your belief? Join a church Bible study class or small group.
• Need to tithe? Drop it in the offering plate at church.
• Desire to be in a mid-week discipleship class? Go to church.
• Need to share a prayer request? Go to church & post it on the prayer wall or meet with a pastor.
• Want to serve in a community outreach event? Go to church and sign up (on a piece of paper).

Today, every single one of those can be done through online technologies, all of which can be accessed on a mobile device. It is because of this near-limitless functionality, and the fact that it’s almost always on their body, that people are finding so many ways to use their mobile devices. Take a look at the top mobile activities over just a three month average:

What’s more, social media continues to expand into a larger audience, fueled by the handy accessibility of their connected mobile devices. The number of U.S. users accessing the Facebook site via mobile reached roughly 44 million as of December 2010, while YouTube and Twitter held the second and third position in the U.S., growing 74% and 71%, respectively.

Mobile is Now, Churches

In much the same way that building a website was a critical component for churches in the 1990′s, developing and using mobile applications will be one of the biggest needs (and challenges) for local churches. In fact, starting with a new website design today is probably a great starting point, as a mobile version of the site not only makes viewing it on a mobile device easier to read, the site navigation decisions that drive mobile design are excellent ways to trim the fat off of church websites.

Other mobile applications are readily available, many of them free, for churches to equip their staff & members. Some of my favorites include:

• YouVersion
• TruthCasting
• Planning Center Online
• F1Touch (iPhone version)
• Foursquare
• Facebook
• Twitter

Mobile will continue to grow and make church attendees more acutely aware of how much your churches does NOT have available (or at least visible). In time, I believe that mobile technology will be leveraged to make some percent of a church’s experience location independent. Anytime, anywhere is where people’s lives are moving and church should be an active, mobile part of life.

Do you think churches will change because they want to or because they’ll have to?

* Sources include CITA & comScore

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