Ok, so I have been playing around with Twitter for a little while now and the idea popped into my head that I could use Twitter to communicate with my youth ministry!

Is anyone doing this? If so I’d like to hear about it.

Some may ask why? Listen to this: you can set twitter up so that your updates will automatically text the phones of those that follow you. Yeah – so what a great way to communicate to your students.

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Go to twitter and sign up your youth ministry. I suggest that you pick something close to your youth ministry’s name for the ID for example my twitter page is: http://twitter.com/stevemblanchard and so you will want to pick the ending to be as closely related to your youth ministry – hopefully you can still grab something that works. When it asks for the name of the person setting up the account I encourage you to put, “Youth Leader” so that way if you get fired (hopefully not) or leave to another ministry, the next youth leader could take it over and utilize it.
2. Get Your Students to Sign up with Twitter and follow the youth ministry account. This is by far the most administrative and toughest step to accomplish but if you can get it done – how fun!
3. Next make sure that they can receive texts to their phone and get that part set up properly. The idea here is that when you send out a new twitter message – they will get that message as a text on their phone automatically! Now you can see how cool this can be. Setting up their phones so that they receive your twitter updates will probably be the hardest part of this.
4. Make sure that you teach them how to use Twitter from their phone. There is a wealth of information about twitter and how to use it. Here is their phone FAQ this link will also educate you how to twitter from your phone.

I hope now you see the power of twitter and what it can do for your youth ministry. Once things get set up properly you can send out updates and all of your youth ministry kids will get it on their phones! Oh yeah, twitter is still completely FREE so that is a huge bonus for youth ministry people.

Our youth ministry is testing this new communication method out this summer and I can’t wait to share with you how it goes.

Here are some other things to think about:

• Not everyone has phones. Yeah believe it or not you still need to be aware of who is left out of the loop.
• This may need to be communicated with the parents and I would highly encourage you to try and get the parents to follow as well so they receive the same updates as their teenagers.
• Be aware that some aren’t set up on unlimited texting so the more you update the more cost it could be to a families phone bill.
• Might need to have a training session where everyone gets educated on how to do this and get set up correctly
• Even though some may not have phones – they can still get a twitter account from the web and still see and receive updates

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