Media Outreach

I spend a ton of time on Facebook. Probably more than I should. @lauraburrus thinks I’m a Facebook stalker because I comment constantly, and almost immediately on my friends posts. I can’t help it. I’m a relationship oriented individual, and I truly care what my friends are doing.

Facebook has integrated itself into most of our daily lives. If I want to know what’s up with my family, I know my mom, brother, all my cousins, both sets of grandparents and a few aunts and uncles are all using Facebook regularly, so just one click and I have the low down on the Johnson clan.

So, how can a church really leverage people’s use of this great community to help build community inside & outside of their four walls? Step 1- custom Facebook page.

Most of us are used to seeing the normal wall page when we hit a group on Facebook. Icon left, status updates on the right. But what if there could be more? Well, thanks to a few helpful tools, there can be! A few churches across the country have pioneered creating a more welcoming custom interface for when people find their church. After all, you only have 7 seconds to capture a website visitor and make an impression (whether or not you’re on Facebook). Here’s some amazing examples we found:

http://www.facebook.com/northpointonline
http://www.facebook.com/parkcommunitychurch?v=app_4949752878&ref=ts
http://www.facebook.com/legacyfellowship

Ok, so that last one is my church. We were playing around with how to execute this, and as you can see, it’s pretty awesome! So, it took me a while to figure all this out, and today, you can have the benefit of my “how-to” because I couldn’t find this information published anywhere. So, here goes:

1. Create a page for your ministry
2. In Facebook, click on applications and search for “Static FBML”
3. Once you have installed it, add it to your church’s page. This will enable you to add a custom tab to your Facebook page that will house this content. In my example, I called it Welcome.
4. In a third party program, create your interface. If you need help here, that’s where faithHighway comes in. We can totally help you out. Just call us. We can consult you or just do it for you.
5. You will need to have both images & code. So, upload the images you are using to your host online and grab the code you programmed.
6. Click on “edit page” on your church’s FB page. There should be a new section called “Static FBML”. Paste your code in here and viola! You have a custom tab. You’ll want to keep the width below 760 pixels, but you have quite a bit of freedom within that area to do some killer stuff.
7. Lastly, in your edit page settings, change the landing page to be this page. The really slick thing is that first time visitors who aren’t a member of your group can hit this page, and regular visitors go straight to the wall page, so you can get past the “marketing” and get right to the meat of the content.

The possibilities for this are endless! We at faithHighway and MediaOutreach are very excited about this new development! If your church wants advice or help on getting something set up on Facebook, we would love to help! Has your church already put together a custom page? We’d love to see it! Leave us a note in the comments and show off your fly work!

Photo By: Spencer E Holtaway