Jon Twitchell
January 24th, 2011, 12:56 PM
One of my frustrations with facebook has been the difficulty of automatically updating business/organization "pages," either remotely through a phone, or scheduled posting. For Advent Longings, I set up a couple of blogs which would automatically publish posts at scheduled times, and feed my facebook pages or twitter feeds. But it was cumbersome... and it's not necessarily intuitive to create a blog simply to generate automated content on facebook/twitter.
Enter hootsuite (http://hootsuite.com/p_3145).
With their free service, you can connect to up to 5 social networks, and choose which networks you want to post to. They have a web-application, as well as mobile apps for most phones.
You can compose a post, and send it to all, some, or one of your social networks. For instance, I can send to my personal FB page and my personal twitter account. Or I can send to the Church FP page and twitter accounts. Or, I can just send to the church FB page.
From the web interface, I can also schedule posts in the future (and determine which feeds they get sent to).
This is a great tool for the church that wants to connect through social media, but lacks the staff needed to keep content fresh. For instance, I sat down this morning, and within a couple of hours, scheduled the contemporary collects from the BCP (thanks to Jeremy for the idea) to post on my church facebook page each Sunday at 8am. So far, I'm up to Easter. It won't take long to finish the year.
You could post devotional texts each week as a lead up to the sermon series... Or even enter in a year's worth of scripture references to guide a Bible reading campaign.
From the phone app, I can not only read my respective feeds, but I can post to any or all of them... and I get push notifications of replies or DMs. I don't know that it will replace the standard twitter/fb apps & widgets that I currently have installed, but it will be a good complement to them.
Enter hootsuite (http://hootsuite.com/p_3145).
With their free service, you can connect to up to 5 social networks, and choose which networks you want to post to. They have a web-application, as well as mobile apps for most phones.
You can compose a post, and send it to all, some, or one of your social networks. For instance, I can send to my personal FB page and my personal twitter account. Or I can send to the Church FP page and twitter accounts. Or, I can just send to the church FB page.
From the web interface, I can also schedule posts in the future (and determine which feeds they get sent to).
This is a great tool for the church that wants to connect through social media, but lacks the staff needed to keep content fresh. For instance, I sat down this morning, and within a couple of hours, scheduled the contemporary collects from the BCP (thanks to Jeremy for the idea) to post on my church facebook page each Sunday at 8am. So far, I'm up to Easter. It won't take long to finish the year.
You could post devotional texts each week as a lead up to the sermon series... Or even enter in a year's worth of scripture references to guide a Bible reading campaign.
From the phone app, I can not only read my respective feeds, but I can post to any or all of them... and I get push notifications of replies or DMs. I don't know that it will replace the standard twitter/fb apps & widgets that I currently have installed, but it will be a good complement to them.