Twitter: How To Manage Lots of Followers

Last summer I changed my Twitter philosophy. Prior to that, I was following 123 friends and didn’t really care what anyone else had to say. I had no room for the extra noise in my life. But I realized I was missing out for two important reasons: 1) I was inadvertently communicating to the 2,000 people who followed me that I didn’t care what they had to say. Like talking to them was more important than listening to them. And 2) I was missing the opportunity to add value to more people than I could ever possibly meet.

So I decided at that point that I would aggressively broaden the number of people I’m following. This change led to a 1,900% increase in friends and an 815% increase in followers. Some people ask how in the world I can possibly manage that many followers.

Here is what works for me…

1. I decide which tweets come to the front of the line. To do this, I use the list feature in Twitter. Everytime I add someone, I decide whether they show up on one of my lists. My current main lists are: Family and Friends, Pastors and Leaders, Coaching Network and Pop Culture. Between these four lists I follow 150 people and read 100% of their tweets.
2. I use Tweet Deck on my computer and Twittelator Pro on my phone to view tweets from those on my lists.
3. In Tweet Deck, I also run a column with “all friends.” I breeze this a couple times a day to read tweets and scout new people to add to one of my lists. I always find interesting stuff.
4. I use Tweet Adder to find new friends to follow. For example, I ran a search for anyone who had “executive pastor” in their bio and automatically subscribed to their tweets. This system can be completely automated once you set it up.
5. I attempt to follow everyone who follows me. (I also use Tweet Adder for this, but it isn’t perfect, so please let me know if I missed you!)
6. I also use Tweet Deck to run a constant search on @timstevens. He isn’t me. But he gets LOTS of @mentions directed toward me. So I just constantly monitor his @mentions so I can see anything directed at me.
7. Most days I get more than 200 direct messages. And most of them are auto-replies, but I skim everyone looking for personal DM’s. I also look for porn sites (they usually stand out with creative avatars) and immediately “block” them. So far I’ve blocked 230 accounts.
8. About once a month I run TwitBlock on my account to check for spam or porn. It is real easy within the program to block the sites that rise to the top of the list.
9. Because I’m a stats geek, I use Twitter Counter and Twitter Analyzer to track growth, retweets, @mentions and more. Again, my goal is to add value to people, so seeing how much I’m re-tweeted or mentioned gives me an indicator of how much value I’m adding.

This probably sounds more complicated then it is. But I look at Twitter as a tool to broaden my influence as I follow Christ and lead at home and in the church.

What questions or thoughts do you have?

Twitter = How Can I Add Value to Others?

Last August I wrote an article called Ten Random Things I’ve Learned About Twitter. Since then, more than 42 million new people started using Twitter–so I thought it would be a good time to update the article with some changes based on what I’ve learned since then. I’m going to do this in two posts–this one for everyone who uses Twitter. And the next one for those who manage large numbers of followers.

I’m not a Twixpert or Twenius — but I have learned a few things in my journey through the Twitterverse since I jumped in with both feet in May of 2008.

1. Twitter started as “What Am I Doing?” — then changed last year to “What’s Happening?” I ignore both those questions. The question I ask myself every day is, “How Can I Add Value to Others?”
2. Don’t tweet a message to one individual. That’s called email or text message. Tweets should be for the majority of those who follow you.
3. People don’t like auto messages, like when you have a service send an automatic thank-you every time you get a new follower. Tried it. Backfired. Never again.
4. You should turn Twitter off occasionally. Like anything, you can become addicted. When you are with your family or in a conversation–shut ‘er down. It will wait.
5. You shouldn’t be all business or just a constant quotation regurgitator. Your followers also want to know about you as a person.
6. Don’t use those annoying services that automatically tweet the first 140 characters from your blog posts. Choose your posts selectively, and sell me on why I should jump over to read your blog.
7. Don’t be a Twachine-gun tweeter (someone who spits out 14 in a row). If it was meant for 700 characters, it would be designed that way. Keep it short.
8. Don’t use services like TwitLonger — I don’t want to have to click to read the rest of your sentence. Save long tweets for a blog post.
9. Don’t use @mentions for selling. I stop following people immediately when they use Twitter to spam me.
10. I always try to tweet in 124 characters or less. Why? So people can easily re-tweet me. It requires 16-characters to type RT: @timastevens, and the more re-tweeting, the more value I can add to others.

More Tweet advice tomorrow for people with large numbers of followers.

The Church as the Delivery Mechanism for the Gospel Must Change!

Alan Hirsch has been rocking my boat lately. Here are some quotables from his session today at Velocity.

• We will win or lose the battle for the Church from here in America. If it doesn’t happen from America, it’s going to continue to decline in America.
• We live in a time when our decisions make a difference in the world–and that’s a great thing to celebrate!
• Missional is not just another cute buzz word–it changes everything about how we do church.
• Many years ago–the church was in the center of society. Translating the language didn’t take much.
• But, the church is becoming increasingly isolated in a quickly changing world.
• All communication of the gospel in the west is cross-cultural. We have to become cross-cultural missionaries. (I remember someone writing about that in Pop Goes the Church!).
• Attractional churches work well to reach people who are not too far removed (culturally). When people get further away–it doesn’t work as well. Why? Because we are asking the individual to do the cross-cultural translation to come into the church (rather than us going to them).
• Huge survey in Australia on people’s perception of…
  • God = HIGH marks
  • Jesus = HIGH marks
  • Spirituality = HIGH marks
  • Church = VERY LOW marks
• The good news is that people give VERY high marks on God, Jesus and Spirituality. That is good news for us.
• What has to change? The CHURCH as the delivery mechanism for the gospel MUST CHANGE.
• The problem–90%+ of churches are trying to follow the contemporary, church-growth, attractional model that…at best…will only reach 40% of Americans.
• The problems of the church cannot be solved by doing the same thing that got us into those problems.
• The church that Jesus designed was meant for advance and attack–not defense!
• Keep doing attractional. It works for 40%. It’s not an either/or. It’s a both/and. I’m interested in finding the AND!
• Mission precedes the church. You do mission. The church is something that happens out of mission.
• You plant the gospel. You don’t plant churches. Church planters should be missionaries first.

If you haven’t read The Forgotten Ways yet by Alan Hirsch…get it today. (Hey Granger–there are copies in the bookstore!).

Insecure Leadership

Shawn Lovejoy is the founder of ChurchPlanters.com and the lead pastor at Mountain Lake Community Church. He launched the Velocity Conference today with some great thoughts about leaders and insecurity. Some quotables…

• There’s been many times I’ve gone to bed doubting my calling and myself. I thought it would change as the church grew. But it happens just as much now as when the church was small.
• Because of the internet, you can always find a church growing bigger and faster–and our insecurity will cause us to think our church sucks in comparison (rather than celebrating what God is doing in our church).
• There is too much cookie-cutter church planting happening.
• There is a thin line between learning from a leader and envying them.
• When we are insecure in our own skin we will actually begin to condemn other leaders.
• Francis Chan said, “I could build a church bigger than Jesus.” If you rely on money and marketing, you can build a big church. But that’s not the goal.
• Like David with Saul, there are pastors every day who are leading churches trying to wear someone else’s armor (personality, preaching, talent, etc.).
• It is easy to compare, copy and condemn. That’s why I decided 14 months ago to not read any other pastors blog. And it’s been refreshing.
• It’s a scary place to take off the layers of facade and be vulnerable. But that’s where God wants us to be.

What is Relevance?

A few days ago, Scott McClellan threw out a question on the Collide Magazine blog that is worth thinking about. He asked, “What does relevance mean to you?” And, “What doesn’t relevance mean to you?” He’s working on an article for an upcoming issue.

Here are some thoughts I sent to Scott:

• Relevance doesn’t necessarily mean cool or flashy or trendy.
• Relevance doesn’t mean it’s never been done before.
• Relevance isn’t defined by doing something so crazy that you get the attention of church leaders from around the country.
• Relevance is all about being missional. You are studying the culture and figuring out what works. The goal is to communicate. So you figure out what it takes to communicate (either one-on-one or in a group setting) to the people in front of you.
• You can’t use blanket statements in regards to relevance. You can’t say, “Your church has a choir so it must be irrelevant” or “Your pastor preaches in faded jeans and a shirt from The Buckle so he must be relevant.” Relevance is contextual—and every context is different.
• Relevance must be constantly evaluated. What was relevant last year may be irrelevant this year.
• Relevance is best determined by a team. What seems incredibly relevant to one person may be deemed irrelevant by a crowd of people. We tend to think smarter about these things when we have a diverse team helping us out.
• Relevance is hard work. At Granger, it is a very high value. In fact, cultural relevance is one of our core values. However, I bet we miss the mark on this three or four times each year. We go into a series totally convinced that it will be a home run—and at times we have found out that it had very little relevance to our crowd. We don’t let this discourage us, though. We just keep trying to be better at knowing our culture.
• Relevance doesn’t necessarily equal “felt need sermon series.” Sometimes it will—like when you deliver a parenting or marriage series because you believe that is the most relevant topic you can offer to connect people to Jesus. At other times, the most relevant thing you can do is offer some theological grounding or invite people to prayer and worship.

That’s what I think. What would you add or subtract from this list?

This Marks a Decade

It was February 21st, 2000…exactly 10 years ago today…that Mark Waltz joined the staff at Granger. And I think it was one of the best decisions we’ve ever made. Mark has contributed to the team in unbelievable ways and helped grow the church into a thriving impact on the community.

I’ve been thinking the past few days about this decade of ministry he has just completed on the team. Here are a few of my thoughts or memories:

• I remember getting to know Mark during the interview process and literally changing the job description because of his giftedness. We saw an opportunity to capitalize on Mark’s retail management background to take Granger miles in making our guests feel welcome. And what an amazing job he has done! Fast forward ten years, and now he’s the guy who wrote the book (literally!) on guest services in the church.
• Prior to interviewing Mark, he was just an acquaintance to me. He had been in the church as a volunteer for about three years, and I knew who he was, but we didn’t hang out. I’m not sure when Mark and I became friends…but it didn’t take long. And today I count him as one of my best friends. We relate to each other on so many levels and there are few people I would miss more if he wasn’t around.
• Few people are better at building teams of volunteers than Mark Waltz. When he started he began with 40 or 50 volunteers…now he leads teams with more than 700 volunteers. He is consistently able to infuse his teams with vision–and I am often challenged by his skillful leadership.
• Mark is a great dad to Olivia and husband to Laura. I am awed by his commitment to his family and the way that he refuses to let anything or anyone take priority over them.

So a huge congratulations to you, Mark Waltz. Because you have given your life for a decade…Granger is a better place. Thousands of church leaders around the world are better leaders. And I am a better person.

Blink–and it Will Be Over

If you have kids, are thinking about having kids, may someday have kids, have grandkids, teach or influence kids, or care about people who do–you’ll want to catch the series BLINK: It’s Never Too Late to Start Shaping Your Kids that starts this weekend. Catch it in person at one of six services, or gather with others online on Sunday night.

I Like Black

A few people have asked questions about the new design of LeadingSmart.com. Why did you use black? Why is your blogroll not on the homepage? Who did your design? Why did you switch to WordPress? So I thought I would take a few minutes to explain my design philosophy and give some high-fives to three very deserving friends:

• I get bored easily. I had the same design for 999 posts and more than three years, so it was way past time to make a change.
• I like black. Ask my wife. Every time I get to vote on a color for just about anything, I pick black. Some of you LOVE the new colors, and some of you really don’t. Just be comforted by the fact it makes me smile.
• Many home pages are crammed with stuff. I moved everything I could off the front page on to the LINKS page. From there you will find BLOGS I read, CHURCHES I follow, BOOKS I recommend, PARTNERS I trust, ARCHIVES, and POPULAR POSTS.
• Rather than the normal “About Me” paragraph — I took some time to use pictures to tell the story of what is important to me.
• My SCHEDULE and BOOKS are only interesting to some people, so I also moved them off the home page. Those who are interested have one additional click.
• I switched from TypePad to WordPress for two primary reasons: 1) I no longer have a $149/annual fee, and 2) every designer I’ve talked to prefers WP over TP.
• I made room for site sponsors. For those of you who just groaned, I don’t blame you. Before you point a finger, though, check out my philosophy about sponsorships.

There were three primary players who made this happen…

1. Dustin Maust took my thoughts and dreams and designed the home page.
2. Daryl McMullen took the design and spent MANY hours making it work with a custom template in WordPress.
3. Matt Metzger figured out all the hoops to jump to convert everything from Typepad to WordPress, including comments, links, RSS feeds, uploaded files and more.

I have no idea if these guys are taking on new work, but if you are interested in a new blog design–you should think about hiring them.

Design is subjective. So give me your subjective opinion–what do you like and what do you hate about the new LeadingSmart.com?

What Do You Measure?

I’ve mentioned before how much I enjoyed Just Ask Leadership by Gary B. Cohen. He talks in the book about a conversation he had with Robert Fry (former executive vice president of L.L. Bean), when he asked him “What is the single most powerful question you’ve ever been asked in your career?” He explains the answer:

The answer came to him immediately, but before he shared it, he provided the context. His company measured everything, which is a fairly standard practice for companies that have grown up in the direct marketing industry. But when an outside consultant asked, “What are the top two or three key measurements to know that you’re reaching your goals?” the executive committee fell silent. According to Bob, “As you looked around the table you could sense a fear of not knowing. Each of us had plenty of key performance indicators in our departments, but none that as a company we could all agree on were the most important. It was totally shocking how a company this well organized and planned could be stumped by such a straightforward question.”

So my question for you, church leaders, is what would your answer be? What are the top two or three more important things that you measure? Is it attendance? Baptisms? Money in the offering plate? Or perhaps you measure the depth at which people are becoming more Christ-like or the success at making disciples? If so, exactly how do you measure that?

I wonder if we should be measuring community impact? What if the success of a local church was measured by whether unwed teen pregnancies went down in that community? Or divorce rates were reduced? Or graduation rates went up? Or poverty was eliminated?

I personally don’t think every church will have the same measurements. But I do think it is important to wrestle with the question. And…to be in agreement with your leadership team about your answer.

What is a Church?

Much has been debated about the definition of a church. Is a church defined by having a paid pastor? A building? A calendar of programs and events? Or can a church be two people praying together. What is the essence of what defines a church?

In The Forgotten Ways, Alan Hirsch defines a church like this:

1. A covenanted community – a church is formed not by people just hanging out together, but ones bound together in a distinctive bond. There is a certain obligation toward one another formed around covenant.
2. Centered on Jesus – He is the new covenant with God and he thus forms as the true epicenter of an authentic Christ-ian faith…A covenant community centered around Jesus participates in the salvation that he brings. We receive the grace of God in him. But, more is required to truly constitute a church.

A true encounter with God in Jesus must result in…

3. Worship, defined as offering our lives back to God through Jesus.
4. Discipleship, defined as following Jesus and becoming increasingly like him (Christlikeness)
5. Mission, defined as extending the mission of God through the activities of his people.

This book, and my time with the author, has my brain whirling. What do you think of this definition of the church? Agree or disagree with Alan?