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• People don't naturally want to follow church Twitter dribble - find a unique angle
• Be personal - shun the churchwide Twitter account and let individuals on staff attract attention to their personal accounts
• Give 'em a taste - provide teasers (videos, audio clips, challenging quotes from the upcoming message) that build excitement for next week without resorting to the super lame, "Be sure to come to Awesome Church this Sunday to hear Pastor FirstName teach part 2 of The Series"
• Post real content - there's a short (but very good) list included in the article for the last point, so find it here

• Know how Twitter works - there are about a billion different articles on how to use Twitter effectively. Read a few. Understand the lingo. Know the difference between hash tags (#ChurchAwesome) and replies (@ChurchAwesome).
• Twitter is not about you - well, not solely. Follow leaders from other churches and retweet ideas that you think will challenge or encourage your church followers. This will not only help you communicate messages that resonate with your mission, but they'll give you an idea of the types of tweets you could be composing as well. I especially love Rick Warren (@rickwarren) and Donald Miller (@donmilleris)
• Stick to 140 characters - No one wants to try to read 3 tweets in a row all trying to communicate one point. It's a good way to get people to stop following you. Boil your message down. If you can't boil it down, maybe you should expand on it and make it a blog post (that you can then promote through Twitter!).
• Twaitter.com is a two-edged sword - You're bound to discover it sooner or later: Twaitter is awesome. It's a website that lets you schedule your tweets ahead of time. Already know how you're going to challenge your audience with a follow up tweet on Monday? Great. Schedule it ahead of time. However, use Twaitter sparingly - scheduled tweets aren't reactions to new information or thoughts, so you run the risk of sounding dry or irrelevant if your Twitter account is on auto-pilot.

Hope is always reaching out to the Memphis community with relevant events. Guests range from well-known authors to Christian musicians to dynamic speakers and everywhere in-between, so the new website design needed to afford Hope a great way to show off their upcoming events. SPEAK! designed and built a jQuery image rotation that ties to the event area on the home page. This area creates a "can't miss" visual element focused entirely around Hope's outreach strategy, and since it's built in jQuery rather than Flash, the website stays mobile-device friendly!

SPEAK! also created a "Visit Hope" area to contain information categorized specifically for those who would like to visit Hope Church for the first time. This area is similar to other church websites that employ a slide-down "Ministry Index." However, Hope and SPEAK! felt like the idea could be further developed to connect with a specific audience, so we pushed it further! With great results.

Social media is another area that many churches are paying close attention to (and rightly so!). Of course, we can integrate your Twitter® feed or Facebook® fan app on your website, but depending on your organization, those tools may not be the best fit for your web communication strategy! At SPEAK!, we help you think through your entire web strategy (including social media) and determine the best way to get your message across to your many different audiences.

With Hope, we decided that an obvious but more elegant approach (when compared to the feed and app integration mentioned above) would provide the best mesh-point between website design and social media integration. This way, a visitor to Hope's website sees not only how to find Hope on Twitter® and Facebook® but also how to receive eNewsletter and RSS updates and where to go to see Hope's videos on YouTube®.

Check out the Hope Church website design from SPEAK! Creative.