how a church website can connect with social networks

Let's take a look at two churches that are connecting their website home page to existing social networks like Twitter or Facebook::

[1] Young Nak Celebration Church discreetly signals that it's fully integrated with today's social network technologies, notice the lower left corner of its home page:

[2] Here's another example, from a church in San Antonio called Imagine Fellowship:

What other websites have caught your attention of churches that are connecting their home page to social networks? What are other social networks that a church's website home page should connect to?

// DJ Chuang is a Director at Leadership Network, launching digital initiatives, and connecting multi-site churches and Asian American pastors.

Comments

[Prodigal]

Churches should also connect to LinkedIn. At first glance, it seems targeted exclusively at the professional community, but joining "groups" transforms it.

Through groups churches can create or target specific audiences by geography(e.g. Branson, MO) or activity (e.g. business owners). Each group will automatically email updates to you if you so choose, so it's almost as good as an RSS feed.

[Mickey]

We're trying a variety of things to better connect our website to the various social networks.

1 -- We've built landing pages on our site for the big 3, with varying amounts of info on each one.
http://twitter.mtbethel.org/
http://facebook.mtbethel.org/
http://linkedin.mtbethel.org/

The Facebook page is linked from our home page, which then filters out to the others. The Facebook and LinkedIn pages provide links to groups that we've created, and all three show lists of our staff members who are active on each service.

2 -- Updated our staff pages with quick links to their profiles.
http://www.mtbethel.org/staffalpha.php

3 -- We push our blog entries out via our main account.
http://twitter.com/mtbethelumc

4 -- Update field conditions for our children's recreation for easy access by parents.
http://twitter.com/mtbethelrec

5 -- Post some website page activities to a twitter account. This is kind of cute, but not especially useful:
http://twitter.com/mtbethelsite

That's the bulk of it for now. Our traffic from all three social networks continues to rise, so we're slowly investing a little more time in them.

I'm anxious to hear other thoughts from churches.

[Lex]

We do something similar to the discrete signals.

[Mary Beth Stockdale]

Wondering if any churches have created a ning account for their members to gather?