Twitter is an online social networking service for friends, family and strangers to stay connected, updated and communicate quickly on a tweet by tweet basis. Twitter enables fast communication of practically anything including your updates, new tools, and answers to questions you may have.

Use twitter to keep anyone and everyone updated about new church events, special services, links to cool tools, links to your blog posts and much more. To keep your online audience updated, use Twitter!

How to Use Twitter

Step 1 – Create an Account

First we must sign up for a free twitter account. You will find this process is very easy, simple & short – which is how twitter loves doing things. Go ahead and enter your full name, choose a password and enter your email but before you click create my account – choose a Username. I recommend using a username very close to your website name to stay consistent. For example, www.tlcyouthgroup.com would have the username ‘tlcyouthgroup’ but keep in mind that not all usernames are available so see what’s available and enter a Username, then click Create my account.

To find people you are already connected to through Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail, & MSN just enter your email and password.

Step 2 – Create Your First Tweet!

One of the coolest features of Twitter is the 140 character limit which keeps updates short and simple for your followers. You can find your character counter in the top right hand corner of your page – you’ll want to watch this to ensure your tweet is short enough.

Go ahead and enter your first tweet. Below you can see I added “Hello Everyone, welcome to the TLCYouth Twitter – please feel free to follow!” – then click the update button.

Step 3 – Finding & Following People

Use the search function by clicking ‘Find People’ and search for others that tweet about similar things as you do, for example other churches, youth groups and church related people. To follow someone simply click the follow button on their account homepage. You can remove this person later if you would like.

Step 4 – Manage Your Profile

After you have gotten the feel of Twitter, it’s now time to customize your profile, which is really easy to do by clicking Settings in the top right hand corner.

From you’re profile page you can add a little about yourself, change password, add mobile devices, manage notice settings and upload a profile image & background. I recommend customizing your profile much as possible to match your current church website. Add your logo as your profile picture and if you have the availability create a custom background as well.

Step 5 – Post Regularly

The idea around twitter is to tweet on a regular basis about anything that pertains to your church events and resources you may find. I recommend creating a ‘tweeting structure’ that you can use on a daily basis. This will one, make it faster to create tweets and two, make your tweets look clean and in form. Refer to SanctuaryOne’s Twitter as an example.

That’s a wrap…

Overall, creating and using a Twitter account is simple, easy and truly a fun way to create an online social network that WILL drive traffic to your church website. If you have any questions on Twittering, please feel free to comment below.

Welcome everyone to Part 1 of the WordPress for Beginners series where will begin to cover the basic fundamentals of WordPress 2.7 and will eventually grow until the ultimate guild for beginners using WP.

Today, we will cover the following:

• What is WordPress & Why use it?
• Finding & Logging in to your WP Dashboard
• Understanding the WP Dashboard
• How to write new post, categories & tags

Let’s jump right in…

What is WordPress?

Simply put, WordPress is a free and open source blogging application. However, WordPress is utilized as much more than JUST a blogging platform but rather a CMS (Content Managment System) that allows one to control multiple pages & large amounts of content on a particular website making it a breeze to edit and exspand.

Why use WordPress?

• It’s Awesome - WordPress is known for its easablity, efficentness and power to manage content, blot posts, images, videos, and much more. Simply put, WordPress is just awesome!
• More than a blogging application - One of the best features of WordPress is the ease of using it across various verticals and niches. Use WordPress for you church website, church blog or even your youth website & blog. Everyday users all the way up to huge companies use WordPress to power their website.
• A ton of support - WordPress has grown to be the largest blgging tool in the world and is being used by thousands of sites operateded by millions of people. With that said, the support for WordPress is OUT OF THIS WORLD which can truly come handy when you need an answer to your question(s).
• It’s Open Source & Free - WordPress is open source meaning anyone can create anything for it such as plugins, theme, etc and it’s Free! Not partucally free but 100% free to everyone and anyone which is perfect for churches as it cuts down on website operating cost.

Step 1: Logging in to your WordPress Dashboard

The WordPress Dashboard (aka backend) is where you, the administrator, can manage, create and edit all your pages and post along with changing your site options. To find your websites log in screen simply add /wp-admin/ to the address/URL of your website. For example, if your website URL is http://www.example.com, your dashboard could be found at http://www.example.com/wp-admin/.

I recommend adding your administrator WordPress dashboard to your bookmarks to keep form entering in the /wp-admin/ each time you want to change or add a page or post to your website. You can do this by logging on to your dashboard > Go to bookmarks > then Click ‘Bookmark this page’. This will save you time later.

Step 2: Understand the WordPress 2.7 Dashboard

Before we can start editing away at WordPress we must understand the basics of the WP Administrator Dashboard.

• Admin Menu - Use this menu to manage every part of your WordPress website. Add post, pages, links and approve, decline or delete comments. You can also change every option of your WordPress theme through this menu.
• Right Now - A quick glance at how many post, pages, category’s, tags and comments you have. Also informs you on which Theme and version of WordPress you are currently using and provides an option to update if your are out of date. Be aware of updating your version of WP and plugins as it can alter the way your site is rendered.
• Recent Comments - Gives a quick view of recent comments submitted to your blog postings and allows you to approve, decline or delete them right from the admin dashboard.
• Incoming Links - This dashboard widget uses Google Blog Search to report recent incoming links to your particular blog postings. A very valuable way to keep track on who is linking to your blog post and spreading the word. Remember to comment on their blog, thanking them for the link back as it provides traffic to your website.
• Plugins - A quick view at the most popular, newest and recently updated plugins from the WordPress Plugins page. View all the recent plugins out there that can help you tweak and enhance your website. Beware of updating & adding plugins unless you are confident it will not alter your website and its functionality.
• Quick Press - An easy and fast way to add post to your blog. Enter your title, content & tags and click ‘Publish’ right from your admin dashboard.
• Recent Drafts - A quick reference to all your pages & post that are just drafts; meaning they are not published yet.
• WordPress Development Blog - Recent post from WordPress about development of new versions. A very good way to stay up to date with all the WordPress development news.
• Other WordPress News - Stay in touch with what is happening in the WordPress realm including finding what is new and what is happening to WordPress.

Step 3: Writing/Editing Post & Using Categories & Tags

From your WordPress dashboard, click the Post down arrow, which will open up a sub-menu for the Post section. To add a new post click ‘Add New’ which will then take you where you can write a new post. To edit click ‘Edit’, which will then take you over to a overall list of all your posts. Click which post you would like to change & edit away.

Add New Categories & Tags

Adding & managing your categories is easy. To add a new category click ‘+Add New Category’ > enter your new category > then click ‘Add’. You can choose to add sub-categories by using the drop-down menu right below the Add button. To choose multiple categories for your post, just check-mark each category you want to file that particular post under.

Adding Tags is quite simple as well. To add just enter the tag you want, for example ‘tag1′ and click ‘Add’. You can delete tags by clicking the ‘X’ button beside each tag.

Publish Your Post

To the right of the post writing area you will find the ‘Publish’ section. From this section, you can Publish your new post or ‘Save Draft’ for editing later. You can also change the ‘Status’ of your post to either ‘Draft’ or ‘Pending Review’ which will allow the administrator to review post created by subscribers, which we will discuss later.

If you would like to change the ‘Visibility’ you can do this by clicking ‘Edit’ and choosing weather to show this post Publicly, Password Protected, or Private (default is set to Public). For all you “writing in advance users”, you can select when the post will publish by changing the desired date and clicking ‘Ok’.

That’s a wrap…

Today we covered the very basic core functionally of WordPress 2.7 including finding & logging into our dashboard, understanding our dashboard and creating & editing new post along with categories & tags.

In Part 2 we will cover how to create pages, add images & links. Until then, if you have any questions about what we covered today, please feel free to comment below. Thanks for viewing & God Bless!