It’s just after lunch, and staff meeting went well this morning. After stumbling over the question, “How is Twitter different from a Facebook status (and why is it better)?” my bosses jumped on the Twitter train. Thankfully, one had read last night’s post about this morning’s meeting, so he was prepared for my Twitter diatribe.

Just as most people are when we try something new, the bosses were hesitantly cautious with their new accounts, and this made me realize that as easy as Twitter is, it’s seriously overwhelming to newbies, more so, I think, than Facebook. So I’m thinking of two documents/blog posts: one named “Twitter for LifePointers” for generally helping our people get the most out of what LPC offers on Twitter and another doc for leadership that outlines best practices for tweeting in the context of the church. Many of my friends have pending Twitter 101 posts, and I’ll definitely use their two cents in putting together these documents, but here are some initial thoughts for each:

Twitter for LifePointers

• Setting up an account
• Finding people to follow, who not to follow (recognizing spatters? spitters? we need to coin a phrase for spam tweeters)
• @replies, direct messages, re-tweets, hash marks, and tiny URLs
• Setting up your phone/phone apps
• Setting up extra-Twitter apps like Facebook

Best Twitter Practices at LPC

• Setting up a ministry account (naming conventions, mostly). I want all LPC ministry accounts to be similar (maybe with the simple prefix lpc_ministryname) so our people can more easily recognize the legitimate LPC Twitter accounts.
• Who to follow/not follow. Following some advice from another Twittering church, I’m limiting who LPC follows to our ministry partners (out of the church), our members (in the church), and our neighbors in the Ozarks. Essentially, I want who we follow to be a source for LPCers to find other people we know or think they should know. If our partners, members, and neighbors follow us, we’ll gladly reciprocate (within reason, of course. If an Ozarkian follows us and their tweets are not appropriate–and I mean, seriously not appropriate–we won’t follow them and we may block them).
• What can/should be tweeted?
• Managing Twitter accounts with third-party apps

I realize the Twitter for LifePointers looks like a generic how-to document, but I plan to add LPC-specific notes to it (i.e. if you’re a parent of a youth, consider following the youth account, so the youth pastor can keep you in the loop of what’s going on).

Beyond that, do you all have any ideas for these docs or for educating our people and leaders on the wonderful world of Twitter?