Children’s Ministry Ideas: Hootsuite

I’m going to jump on Matt’s bandwagon for a moment and share a tool with you that I have been trying to put to better use.

Many of the parents at my church use Facebook – and, regardless of my personal preference, it’s good to have a presence there as well. But, I don’t have the inclination to spend much time on Facebook and I often forget how useful it can be.

That’s where Hootsuite can help. Hootsuite has several levels of support and function, but the base level is free. The free version can support up to 5 “streams” and if you need more you can move into the free version. If you tweet, your twitter account (no matter how many lists) all count as a single stream. Facebook accounts and Facebook pages/groups are another stream each.

Having one place to go that has everything saves time, makes things searchable…and best of all (for me), I don’t have to try to figure out the whole timeline thing.

But here’s the best part – and why you need this: With Hootsuite, you can schedule messages to your social network. So, on Friday’s when I am polishing the lessons for Sunday and thinking about the coming week, I can schedule messages for my facebook and twitter account and other messages for our children’s ministry facebook page. I use these scheduled messages to give a daily reminder about what we’re doing the coming weekend and how parents can begin the lessons at home. If I need to edit a scheduled message, that’s no problem either.

If you’re looking for a way to be present on facebook or twitter every day and not have to actually be there everyday, take a look at hootsuite.