Showcasing Your Staff’s Social Networking Info

Most churches and ministries have some kind of a staff directory that includes contact info for their paid staff.  Usually it includes their phone number and email address.  But with the rise of social media, it’s time to consider helping people connect with your staff by including their social networking info.

Mt Bethel UMC in Marietta, GA was featured yesterday on TwiTip and Church Crunch as an example of how to do this.

Staff Directory Example

As you can see in the partial screenshot below from the Mt Bethel website, next to each staff member’s name they include not only their email address but also a link to their profile in Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and FriendFeed.

To get a better idea of how this works, here’s a link to their staff page.

Adding this info to your staff directory doesn’t mean everyone on staff has to use all of these social networks.  As you can see from Mt. Bethel’s example, many of their staff only have an email address listed.

Who is my friend?

Some staff might be hesitant to put a link to their social networking profiles on the church site, in particular Facebook.  Many people use Facebook to post information and pictures privately so their family and personal friends can see it and keep in touch.  So, the idea of making your Facebook profile available to everyone in the church can be a little unnerving.

Do you really want everyone in the church to see pictures of you on vacation in a bathing suit?  Do you really want everyone to read my status updates when you get frustrated and vent?  Are you even going to post things like that to Facebook?

Those are legit questions.

I’m still sorting through my thoughts on these things and will probably post most about it tomorrow.  What do you think?

At the very least, I think it’d be great to add social networking links to the staff directory for those staff who are comfortable with that.  And I would add a link to a personal blog if they write one.