Bare with me, I am going to show you why so many are making a botch of their online presence and shoot themselves in the foot.
I am so saddened by so many ministers when I try to find out a bit about them. Why? Because their social profile is killing them and they don’t get any help from me if I can’t see something about them to confirm they are the real deal.
“Like what sort of things?” you might ask.
Profile photo, Location, personal name, Name of ministry, activity of ministry, a link to a separate ministry page with clear info, address, service times, objectives of church or ministry, some recent activity showing on the public page to show that they care about keeping their info current.
Let me deal with some of the simple ones here in detail and maybe we will address the others in a later post.
Understand facebook terminologies:
Profile: This is about you personally.
It is the first and most important account you have on fb.
Business Page: this a about an entity, it could be a business, a church, a ministry, a charity.
Group: fb allows the creator to set it up in various ways but it has members of the group and usually they can post info and interact with others posts. There are group objectives (explained in about section - at least they should be) and rules (these also need to be clear) . And other facilities we will go into later.
Now we know what the 3 main types of pages there are, lets look at your Profile.
Have you got a nice clean photo of you, it could be an active photo but it is generally better to use a close up of your face so people can recognise you (unless you are doing ministry in a persecuted country).
If you want to be known as a comedian put a funny picture up, if you want to be known as a dog put up a picture of your dog, if you want to be known as someone with something to hide don’t show your face but put a picture of some inanimate object, if you want to be known as a friendly person show a friendly face, as a minister of the gospel a picture of you in situation or a close up of your face (or you and spouse or family if you want), or outside your church etc.
Your picture speaks a thousand words about you. Choose it carefully. Then use the same name (EXACT SAME FORMAT) and photo on ALL your social media accounts so people can identify you easily where ever they find you.
You have a profile picture and a cover photo (that is a long rectangle), let the cover photo say something about you from the setting.
Your Profile info:-
Are you ashamed of your background, then show nothing in your profile settings, but if not, show clearly where you live (city and country), what you do for work (if you are a minister say so, don’t hide behind a self-employed cloak).
If you have graduated a college, university, Bible school or some other training Bible or secular, show what you have done (it adds to your credibility). Showing nothing sounds like you’ve done nothing.
Under employment, give the name of the ministry where you work, even if it is totally voluntary and you earn an income elsewhere (you can show that too). If you work at a church or ministry that has a facebook Business Page you should link to that page, if you don’t have one you should seriously consider having one if you want your ministry to be taken seriously. They are free to set up, but make sure you keep it updated at least once a week and it has a complete profile. Check out ours https://www.facebook.com/BeautifulFeetTaskForce
That’s enough for today, at a later date we will tackle some of the other places where people are shooting themselves in the foot.
If you want to really learn about building a good online reputation I strongly suggest you undertake all the small 10 minute a day tasks in Pulpit Rock Training, it is free on Africa Network BFTF.
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