Love is in the air… or at least Valentine’s Day on the calendar. To love another person is one of the sweetest blessings God gives us. Not far behind that is the blessing of having a website you love. At least that what our team of web geeks thinks.

Seriously though, one of the greatest gifts you can give the people of your church, school, ministry or business is a website that they are proud to share with their friends.

February is “Love Your Website” Month at OurChurch.Com. Our goal for the month is to help you take the design of your website to the next level. Perhaps that means making some minor changes to your site which you can do yourself or perhaps we can help create a brand new custom website. Perhaps you need some feedback and suggestions on how to improve your site. Or perhaps you’d like $50.

Keep reading for more on all these things!

1) Love Your Website Bundles – $50 Off!
Our Website Service Bundles are one of the best deals on the planet and a great way to take your love for your website to a whole new level. Bundles combine a web hosting package, ad-free option, domain registration, search registration and our Template Personalization Service, all at a huge discount. This month we’re giving an extra $50 off all bundles.

Now the disclaimers… This special offer is only available through Feb 28. It’s only available to those who do not currently have a bundle. And it’s not available online – you must call us at (727) 723-2454 to get the extra $50 off. Tell Debbie you want the “Love Your Website” Bundle Special!

2) Get an Awesome Custom-Designed Website You’ll Love!
If you and your organization are ready for an awesome website that is:

• Custom designed to look exactly the way you want it
• Has all the functionality to help you achieve your mission
• Is easy for you to update and add to yourself
• Can be updated by multiple administrators anywhere there’s an Internet connection

Check out some of the organizations we serve in our web design portfolio. Then request a free, no obligation phone consultation.

3) Web Development Videos
We want every Christian organization to have a website they love whether it’s provided by us or by some other means. One of the ways we’re doing that is by creating a series of videos to help “educate consumers” (that’s you) about the website development process. That way you know how to evaluate the options available to you. The first two videos have been published:

• 5 Things You Need to Know Before Hiring a Web Developer
• 6 Questions to Ask Before Hiring a Web Developer

Stay tuned for more videos about website platforms, prices, maintenance, how to discuss website needs with your board and more.

4) $50 to Share the Love
When you love someone you want the world to know about it. If you love your OurChurch.Com website, we want you to let the world know. And we want to give you $50 for doing it. There are two options.

A) Follow us on Twitter and then tweet: I love my @OurChurchDotCom website – http://YourWebsite.com (You must use @OurChurchDotCom in your tweet so we can see it and enter you in the drawing)

Or

Like our Facebook page and then post to Facebook: I love my @OurChurch.Com website – http://YourWebsite.com (If you type @OurChurch, Facebook should give you the option to select OurChurch.Com, making the “OurChurch.Com” a link to our FB page. You must do this so we see your post and enter you into the drawing. Here’s a quick video demo of how to do it.)

You may post to Facebook and Twitter once per day. Each post will count as an entry. On February 28, we’ll select one winner who will receive a $50 Visa gift card.

We love you!

Thanks to all of you who have given us the opportunity to help you achieve your mission online through our web hosting, web design and SEO services or by adding to the conversation here on our blog.  We love you! And we hope you love your website or are taking steps make your website more lovable this month.

In His Service,
Paul Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

Google has made a major change in their Google+ Local terms of service that will affect how you get reviews for your local organization.  Find about about this change and other changes in the search engines in the video below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohMhmiESVmM

Here’s a brief outline of the video:

1. Google is still dominating search (surprise!)
2. Google did another Panda update.  These happen regularly now and should be expected.
3. Google updated their Google+ Local terms of service.  They now expressly state owners and staff members should not post reviews for organizations and organizations should not have computer kiosks solely for the purpose of customers/members posting reviews.
4. Bing updated their images search to make it quicker and more attractive.
5. Bing updated the appearance of their Social Sidebar.
6. Bing now includes information about famous people and places in their Snapshot column.

If you prefer, you can read the January 2013 SEO Update here.

How is your site ranking in Google and Bing?

We are in the internet age. So, you need to stay strong in the search engines and use the internet to achieve your mission online. 

If you have a local organization, listings are very important.  When people search in Google Maps, Bing Maps, or Yahoo Local, local listings are what show up in the results.  If your organization doesn’t have a local listing, then you won’t show up.  If you do have one, but only have basic (or less) contact info, then people are less likely to contact you.  So, it’s important to make sure you have Google, Bing, and Yahoo listings and that they are fully setup.

Tip: Setup Listings in Google and Bing Maps.
Take a few minutes and do a search for your organization’s name, city and state in Google maps, Bing maps, and Yahoo local.  If your organization doesn’t show up, then go ahead and create a listing.  If your organization does show, click through to the listing and claim the listing.  Claimed listings tend to rank better and it will give you better control over the listing.

Add Information:
Once you’ve claimed your listing or while you are setting up a new listing, make sure you add as much information as possible.  Upload pictures and link videos.  And, most importantly, link to your website.

You can create your listings by following these links:

• http://www.google.com/places/
• http://www.bing.com/businessportal
• http://listings.local.yahoo.com/

It doesn’t take long to setup or claim a listing, but it could make a world of difference for your local organization.

There are a lot of organizations that don’t do SEO (Search Engine Optimization).  They have a lot of good reasons for that choice.  So, I thought I’d put together the top 10 reasons why you really shouldn’t do SEO:

10. If your business grows, you might have to hire some new people and that can really be a hassle.

9. If people like your organization enough, they’ll keep searching for you…even to page 1348.

8. You already are getting enough visitors to your website.  100 visitors a month is a lot, right?

7. Your business is already making enough money.  Anyway, if you made more, you’d just have to pay more taxes.

6. SEO, SEM, PR, SERP…Ahh!  There are just too many acronyms.  IKR? AAMOF IHA 2. IMHO, PCMCIA, 4COL! AWHFY?

5. Nobody really uses search engines.  It’s just a fad.  The Yellow Pages, that’s what people use.

4. Your classes are full and you don’t want to bother with one of those annoying “waiting lists”.

3. You like having a small church.  You don’t need outsiders.

2. You’re a Christian organization.  God will simply cause people to contact you like He provided manna for the Israelites.  You don’t have to work at it.

1. Someone else will help those people.

So, if any of these apply to you, stay away from SEO!  If they don’t, give me a call.

• If you have a website and you aren’t getting much traffic, online marketing can bring you that traffic you desire.
• If you want to sell more widgets, online marketing can bring you customers.
• If you want more people visiting your church, online marketing can bring them to your door.
• If you want more students, online marketing can fill your classroom.
• If you want to reach more people for Christ…yep, marketing can help their, too

It’s Not Just Marketing.  It’s Reaching Your Goals.
Hi, my name is Kurt Steinbrueck and I am the Director of Marketing Services with OurChurch.Com.  Marketing is not just my job, it’s something I value; not because I really like marketing, but because I like seeing Christian organizations achieve their goals to the glory of God and I like being a part of that.

You see, marketing isn’t about campaigns and slogans and what not, it’s about achieving goals.  I not only think marketing can help you to reach your goals, I’ve seen it happen.

OurChurch.Com’s most effective marketing is our presence in the search engines, and that didn’t just happen.  We’ve had to develop strategies to improve search engine rankings.  I meet people visiting my church who found us online.  My wife’s Christian school has grown every year, even in this down economy, and their online marketing has helped them to achieve that.

I’m sharing this with you because I want you know that I truly believe that good online marketing can help organizations reach their goals.  I don’t just help others with their marketing, I put these strategies into practice at the places that are most important to me and have seen them work.

October is Marketing Month!
All during the month of October we will be focusing on online marketing here at OurChurch.Com.  I will be writing articles about online marketing techniques, posting easy tips to help you get your online marketing underway, and highlighting just a few of the many organizations with whom I have had the privileged of working with to help them towards their mission.  We’ll be doing some social shares as well.  And, who knows, maybe there will be a surprise or two during the month.

Search Marketing Services:
I know that paragraph heading makes it seem like this is going to be a sales pitch, and it is…but it’s also not.  You see, marketing isn’t really an expense.  It’s an investment; one that should bring you more in return than you put into it.

Think about it.  Taco Bell doesn’t spend millions of dollars every year getting a chiwawa to talk to you because they like dogs.  They do it because by spending millions of dollars marketing, they get back tens of millions of dollars in sales.  The same should be true of your marketing, though maybe not in the millions…or maybe it is …  It’s not just true for businesses either.  It’s true for schools, ministries, and even churches.

I’ll be sharing a lot of online marketing information over this coming month and have written a lot previous on this blog, the Christian SEO Guys blog, and the Church Marketing Online blog.  All this information can help you to better market your organization.  But I also know that for many marketing isn’t their thing or they just don’t have time.  If you know you need to be marketing, but your really don’t want to do it yourself…or if it’s something that’s been sitting on your “to do” list since January, we’d be happy to help.  Whether you have a church, school, ministry, or business…whether you want to reach people nationally, or in your local area…we can help.

Please take look at our marketing services at http://marketing.ourchurch.com/ and request a free consultation today.  If you don’t see the type of service you are looking for, please let us know.  We can customize a service to meet your specific needs.

Give Me Feedback:
So, please keep an eye out for the post throughout this month.  If you have any questions or subjects you’d like me to address, please leave a comment and let me know.

• Leave a comment below and let me know what you would like to discuss this month.

God bless!

Your local organization is just one of many out there.  We all want to show up well in Google and Bing, but unfortunately, there is only one #1 ranking and only ten rankings on the first page of results.  So, what decides if your church, school, or business is ranked #1 or #51 and can you do anything to improve your rankings?  (I’ll give you a hint…you can )

There are four big factors that determine how well your local organization ranks in the local search results like Google Maps.

1. You Listing’s Content.  Your organization’s name, the description you include in your listing, and the categories you choose play a significant role in your rankings.  Try to use your city name and any descriptive words you want associated with your organization (I.E. “family church”, “Christian school”, “craft supplies”)
2. Your Location.  I know you can’t really do anything about this, but how close your organization is physically located to what the search engines consider the center of town has a big impact on your rankings.  If your location isn’t in the city your want to target, that makes it even more difficult to rank well.  There are, however, things you can do to overcome this as we’ll talk about in a minute.
3. Positive Reviews.  Ratings and reviews, both on the search listings and other local listing sites can have a significant impact on your rankings.  The more the better.  This is one of the ways you can overcome not being located in your city’s town hall building.  You can read more about the importance of positive reviews in my previous post, Church Marketing Round Table Follow Up Tip – Church Reviews.
4. Local Citations.  The more citations your organization has around the web, especially from quality, authoritative websites, the better.  Having many citations can have a big impact on your rankings.  This is very important for churches, schools, and businesses in large cities and this is what I want to talk about today.

What Are Local Citations?
Local citations (sometimes called Google citations) are simply listings of your organization with its name, address, and phone number.  The listing can appear pretty much anywhere to qualify as a citation and does have to include a link to your website, though it can and it’s better if it does.  The important thing is that your church, school, or business is cited (referenced) and the citation includes your address and phone number.

Why Are Local Citations Important?
There are 2 reasons Local citations are important to the search engines.

1. Local citations send a signal that your organization is real and has a real location.  Many local citations also indicates that your organization is well known and important.  When the major search engines started their local search options, organizations quickly realized that showing up in those local search results would bring more traffic. So, organizations started creating listings, even if they didn’t actually have a real local presence.  This is essentially spam and wasn’t good for the search results.  The search engines realized that if an organization is referred to on other sites with their local contact info, they could use that to confirm whether an organization is real and thus whether they really deserve to show up in the local search results.
2. Local citations can indicate an organization’s popularity and importance.  If a local organization is referred to frequently on many websites, then the search engines see that as an indication that many people know about them and consider them worth noting.  This causes the search engines to think that the organization is popular and important and thus worthy of a high search ranking.  In this way, citations help improve local search results in a similar way that links help websites to rank better in the general search rankings.

Who Needs Local Citations?

• Any local organization that isn’t ranked #1 for their target keywords in their city
• Any local organization that is in a large city with lots of similar organizations
• Any local organization that wants to improve their rankings for searches in the towns near their town

How Do You Get Local Citations?
You can get local citations in a variety of ways.  The most common methods of getting citations are setting listings in local listing sites and doing things that are news worthy.  By doing something news worthy, a organization can have stories written about them in newspapers (most of which have online versions now) and blogs.  If you are contacted by someone wanting to write a story about your organization or you find a story online about your organization, ask them to include your contact information with your organization’s name.  Other than that, you can go out and get local citations by setting up listings in local review sites, church locators, school directories, business review sites, and directories.

Hopefully, this is enough to get you out there getting local citations.  If you’re still unsure or you don’t really have the time do this, we can help with that, too with our local citations service.

Are you having trouble ranking well in the local search results?

Do you have any questions about local citations?

What local citation sites do you think are the most important?

I firmly believe that marketing is crucial to the success of any website and I really want you to succeed with your website. So, I want to help you to get things going with the online marketing of your site.

A good, effective online marketing plan is the first step in a successful online marketing campaign.  Creating the plan is something for which you should set aside some real time so you can adequately evaluate the various aspects of the plan and proceed with a realistic plan that can be done successfully.  Entire books have been written on developing marketing plans, so this article is, by no means, an exhaustive resource on the topic.  Rather this article is intended to help you move in the right direction and, most importantly, take the initiative to create a marketing plan and put it into practice.

Here are 10 steps to create a marketing plan:

1. Prayer - We need God’s direction in all things.  So, begin by submitting yourself to the Lord and asking for wisdom, discernment, and creativity and for the Lord to guide you though this process.
2. Set Goals - You need specific goals both to direct you in your marketing decisions and to help you gauge whether your marketing is being effective.
3. Figure Out Your Finances - This is tricky because marketing really is an investment, not an expense.  You should get a return on your investment that is greater than what you spend (yes, even churches).  However, when you are first starting you can’t assume the marketing will effectively cover your costs.  So, make sure you can cover the expenses and then treat it like an investment.
4. In-House or Hired Pros - Who is going to do the marketing?  To save on money you may consider doing the marketing in-house, but consider you and your staff’s knowledge, skills, and time when making this decision.  In-house may seem cheaper, but you could actually be worse off financially and in reaching your goals due to inefficient marketing practices, people not having time to properly implement the marketing, and unrealized gains.
5. Choose a Marketing Strategy - There are a lot of ways you can market your website/organization, from SEO, to online ads, to social media and more.  Do some research and figure out what marketing methods will best suit your organization and help you achieve your goals.  If you are hiring a professional marketer, you can utilize their expertise when making this decision.
6. Allocate Resources - This may be money, personnel, time, etc.  Even if you are doing the marketing in-house, there will still be expenses.  Even if you hire someone to perform the marketing, there are still aspects that will need to be handled in-house.  If nothing else, someone needs to be communicating with the marketer, but you will probably need to have someone tracking and evaluating the marketing, as well.  Figure out who is going to be working on the marketing and what they will need to do it effectively.
7. Setup Metrics - Don’t ever just assume your marketing is working.  You need to setup a means of measuring how effective the marketing is.  This includes setting up analytics for your website to monitor traffic and goal conversions.  This may also include off-line tracking like asking visitors how they learned about your organization.
8. Evaluate the Marketing - After the marketing has been started, you need to regularly examine the metrics you setup and evaluate your marketing strategy and practices.  Look for what’s working and what isn’t and adjust accordingly.
9. Test, Evaluate, Tweek, Test… - Even effective marketing can usually be improved.  The best marketing plans include constant testing, evaluating, and adjusting.  This may be trying different ad text or targeting different keywords, etc..  You setup some tests, see what works best, drop/change what doesn’t work, and try to improve what is working.
10. Prayer - Now as you move forward with your plan, pray the the Lord will bless your work and continue to guide you.

Alright. It’s time to do it!
I encourage you to set aside time over the next week get started on creating your marketing plan.  If you delay, you’re actually delaying getting more traffic to your site and reaching your goals.  So, don’t put this off.

At OurChurch.Com we are more than happy to provide information and resources for you to be able to achieve success with your website. In addition to information, we also offer services. So, if you do decide that you want to hire a professional marketer to do the marketing for your website, please take a moment to go look at the marketing services we offer and request a free, no obligation consultation today.

• Have you developed a marketing plan?
• Do you have any questions about developing a marketing plan?

SEO, PPC, SEM, IBL, SERP, +1, cost per click, impressions, likes, blog, alt tag, title tag…

For most of you, at least some of these terms are familiar.  Some of you may know all of them and, for others, I may have well been writing in Farsi.  All this month we’re going to be focusing on the marketing of your organization, primarily by marketing your website.  I deal with these things all day, every day, but I realize some of you have a life and may not be as familiar with the various forms of marketing, their terminology, or even be sure what marketing is or why it is important.  So, I thought I’d start there.

Marketing is a business term.  Since I’m not a business marketing isn’t important for me.  Right?

Yes, marketing is a business term, but, “No!” not being a business doesn’t mean that you don’t have to market your organization or website.  When you boil it all down…

Marketing is simply letting other people know your organization exists and telling them why they should connect with you.

That is something every organization needs to do.  If you are a business, you need to tell people why they should purchase your products/services.  If you are a church, you need to reach people with the Gospel and tell people why they should attend your church.  If you are a school, you need to attract new students.  If you are a ministry, you need to tell people why they should be a part of your ministry, support your ministry, or why they need the help of your ministry.  Every organization needs to market itself.

You need marketing to succeed!

OK.  I need to market my organization.  So, how do I do that?

There are many ways to market an organization, everything from commercials to search engines to a guy spinning a sign on a street corner.  Because at OurChurch.Com our mission is to help you achieve your goals online, we’re going to  focus on online forms of marketing.  Below are some of the ways you can market your organization online:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO): This is doing what it takes to get your website to show up at the top of the search results for keywords (search terms) related to your organization.  The most common things you can do for SEO are making sure the search engines can read your site, optimizing your web pages for specific keywords, and getting other websites to link to your site.  For local organizations, SEO also includes setting up listings in local search engines, getting reviews, and creating citations.
• Pay Per Click Search Advertising (PPC): SEO (above) can take time and for certain keywords it can be very difficult to rank well.  So, the major search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo provide a way for you to pay to show up in the search results.  You bid a certain amount of money to show up in the search results.  Then every time someone clicks on your advertisement you pay the search engine that bid amount.  It’s a way to get into the search results immediately and show up for keywords for which you would not otherwise be able to rank well.
• Social Marketing: Social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Google+ provide a great way to reach a lot of people with your message.  You can make announcements and provide videos, pictures, articles, quotes, coupons and other forms of interesting content for people to enjoy and share.  As people share your content, more and more people become aware of your organization and learn about who you are and what you do and you can draw people into your website.
• Online Advertising: Many websites have ads on their site.  For a price you can put an ad on their site and get your brand and message in front of all their website’s visitors.
• Affiliate Marketing: This is when you offer people (called affiliates) a commission to either sell your products/services or send you leads (people who are interested in your products/services).  Unlike online advertising where you pay up front for the ad space, with affiliate marketing you don’t pay until a sale has been made.

This is just a basic overview of some of the more common ways people market their organizations online. I believe marketing is crucial to every organization and online marketing is crucial for every website.  Without online marketing, your website is like a building in the middle of the dessert with no roads leading to it.

As we continue on through this month, we’ll discuss how you can be using these forms of marketing to grow your organization and achieve your goals.

Are you doing any marketing right now?

If so, what are you doing and what kind of marketing have you found to work best for you?

This post is an excerpt from my new e-book entitled The Unlikely Missionary: From Pew Warmer to Poverty Fighter. The book is the story of how an average, everyday Christian who was willing to be used by a big God discovered a passion and purpose that took him half-way around the world on a poverty-fighting mission trip. The book is also filled with practical ideas and activities that can help you discover the same kind of passion and purpose.

Several years ago, I was digging around for opportunities to be inspired by a topic and to share my writing with other like-minded bloggers when I stumbled on Blog Action Day (http://blogactionday.org). On October 15th of every year (since 2007) bloggers from around the world write about the same topic. Registered bloggers then have their contributions become a part of the massive collection of perspectives on a single issue.

It’s really pretty incredible… so many voices all singing the same song like a giant choir that’s determined to make sure the whole world feels the ripple.

I know that I felt it.

Blog Action Day 2008 was on the topic of poverty. Now that’s a topic that I knew that I wanted to write about!

After all, I’m a Christian, and Christians are supposed to care about poor people and stuff, right?

I’m pretty sure Jesus talked about that kind of stuff, and the more I dig into the Old Testament I see some references back there too. In fact, the Bible talks about poverty all over the place, so I figure I should probably be talking about it more.

I thought of that one verse at the beginning of a sermon where Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor…” Then I looked it up in Matthew 5:3. Oh snap, that’s referring to “the poor in spirit.”

Now I was on a mission. I stare at the screen of the computer that costs as much as some people make in an entire year and rub my eyes because I’m up way too late for me to be completely coherent at work the next day. But I had to get to the bottom of this issue.

Let’s see, there’s that story where Jesus tells about the poor widow and her two coins. (My handy dandy BibleGateway.com helped me find it in Mark 12 by searching for the word “widow”). But Jesus doesn’t say what we should do about poverty. He just talks about what the poor widow gave. Still, I’m on to something. God seems to look after those who have very little.

Hmm… what else? That’s right, Jesus told some rich guy to sell everything he had and give it to the poor, and then follow him (in Mark 10). I knew all about this one. Jesus is saying we shouldn’t be so connected to our self-made, earthly wealth. It’s the rich guy’s bad attitude more than hungry poor people. Right? Regardless, I think I’m getting on the right track. There’s definitely some stuff in the Bible about the poor, and it’s certainly clear that God cares about them, and not so much about the comforts we tend to cling to.

By this time, Blog Action Day was only a few days away. I wouldn’t have time to iron out an entire theology of poverty. That would have to wait. I had enough to know that poverty is important, so now I needed to figure out what Christians should be doing about it.

Except I didn’t know anyone personally who was doing anything about the problem.

I didn’t even know how widespread the problem is. So a little research was in order.

I did a little poking around, mostly by surfing the Internet on poorly designed webpages that seemed to have good information, but looked like they had been created by some kid in the 5th grade trying to earn extra credit. I’m floored by the numbers that I find. Did you know that half of the world’s population lives on less than $2.50 per day? UNICEF reports that 22,000 children die every day due to poverty. I was shocked by the news that one billion people entered the 21st century unable to read a book or sign their name.

But the problems don’t stop with poor people. The rest of us are getting richer and fatter every day. Yeah, I said fatter. I get angry when I learn that the poorest 20% of the world accounts for 1.5% of total consumption, while the richest 20% accounts for over 76% of total consumption. Then I look around and see obesity becoming a bigger problem every day in the United States, not to mention my own ever-increasing waistline.

Yeah… theological reasons aside, a little bit of Google activity looking for poverty statistics reveals the world’s self-made epidemic.

Now what to do with my new found rage? Who’s fighting poverty? And more importantly, who in the church (if anyone) is fighting poverty? If the church should be leading the charge since God cared so much about it, right?

Of course, I run into some crackpot solutions that’ll never fly. One guy says that all of the world’s wealthiest people should develop a moral conscience and give everything they have too the poor. (Hey, that sounds like what Jesus challenged someone to do, and we know how that turned out). People simply won’t give everything away to the poor, and people who blame the wealthy for the problem never seem to recognize their own wealth. The wealthy people who should be doing taking on the issue of poverty always seem to be just a little wealthier than they are.

But I found people who were doing some interesting work…

For more of this story, you can check out TheUnlikelyMissionary.com or purchase it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and E-junkie.

Also, Blog Action Day this year is on Sunday, October 16th. It coincides with World Food Day, and therefore will focus on the topic of food. If you decide to participate, I’d love to see a link to your post and hear about your experience of writing on this topic. How can an event like this help you find passion and purpose for your faith?

Facebook rolled out another batch of changes last week and announced even more. There has been the usual clamor of complaints and boycott threats from those not happy about the modifications, but let’s face it, Facebook is not going anywhere. So, I recommend a more constructive response:

1. Learn as much as you can about the most recent changes
2. Understand how they affect your organization and then
3. Adjust your Facebook strategy to make the most of them

The New Newsfeed

The changes individual users notice immediately are the changes to the newsfeed.

Gone is the “Top News” with the option to switch to “Most Recent.” Now there are Top Stories and Recent Stories. The Top Stories are things Facebook thinks you might be interested in based on your interaction in the past. The Recent Stories are in chronological order, but they don’t include everything from all your friends. Facebook filters Recent Stories and only gives you what it thinks you’ll want to see.

Introducing the Ticker

For those who want to see all their “friends’” status updates, Facebook has introduced the Ticker, which is a real-time list of everything your friends are doing. It includes everything in Recent Stories plus notices of when your friends add friends, like pages, comment on stories, play Farmville, and more.

In other words, the Ticker is what old Facebook used to be.

It also looks suspiciously like Twitter.

New Lists = Google+ Circles

The other big change individual users will notice is that Facebook has improved their lists functionality. It functions a lot like circles in Google+. Once a user creates a list, they can not only click to view just the updates from the people on that list, but they can now also publish content that only people on that list can see.

So, you can now create a “family” list and share pictures so only people on that list can see them. Or you can create a “work” list and post links to industry-related news that only your co-workers would be interested instead of bothering everyone with it. You can share content with multiple lists, make it public, or even hide from specific individuals.

Other Changes

There are a bunch of other new things that are available now like watching TV & movies with your friends, listening to music and seeing what your friends are listening too, and others big changes that are coming soon like the Timeline and Facebook Gestures. But those won’t have much have much impact on churches and non-profits now, and that’s where I want to go next.

Likes Less Important, Engagement Critical

With the changes to individual users newsfeeds, Facebook takes another step towards playing god in what content Facebook users see.

All content is not created equal. No longer can you expect everyone who “likes” your organization’s Facebook page to see everything you post to Facebook. Status updates, photos, videos and links that get “likes” and “comments” have become even more prominent and thus more likely to be seen, while those that do not have become even less prominent and less likely to be seen.

This presents both a challenge and an opportunity for churches, non-profits and businesses. It’s more important than ever that organizations engage people with their content. Those that do will find their content being seen by more people.

Furthermore, every time someone likes or comments on your content, that action shows up in all their friends Tickers. So, engaging content gets double prominence.

If you manage your organization’s Facebook page, every time you post to Facebook you have to ask yourself more than, “What do I want people to know?” You have to ask yourself, “What do I want people to do?” And “How can post this in a way that will invoke a response?”

Relationship Building More Important

If you use Facebook personally, you understand that you engage more with the people you have the best relationships with – your immediate family and close friends. The same is true with organizations. The better your organization builds relationships with its “fans” the more they will “like” and comment on your content. That means doing things like

• listening and responding to wall posts and comments
• posting polls and asking for feedback
• featuring members or customers
• posting photos and video of your “fans” interacting with your organization offline

Discussion

1. Which recent changes to Facebook do you think will have the biggest impact on churches and non-profits? Why?
2. Do you think engagement and relationships on Facebook are more important than ever now?
3. What are you doing to strengthen relationships and engage more in Facebook?