For the month of August we’re doing a series at Liquid Church called “Big Fish” . . . it’s a fun look at the story of Jonah.  It’s been a great series to kick off the fall line up this year!

As people came into the first week of the series they were met with a “photo booth” where they were asked to get their picture taken with a huge catfish.  We put some of our best “barkers” on the booth to attempt try to attract people to get their picture taken.  Not only was this a fantastic “church is fun” moment . . . each of foyers were packed with people laughing and joking about this huge catfish but it was also a great way for us to help our people share their love of Liquid with their friends.  After the picture was taken our team told our guests that the photos would be up on Facebook and handed them a business card with the web address and invited them to “tag and share” the photo the next day.  Links to the photo albums: [Motown] [The Brunz] [Nutley]

Getting pictures of your people and events continues to be a fantastic way to encourage your people to naturally share about your church on Facebook.  Particularly when these photos are as fun looking as holding a massive catfish!  Here are some the statistical results from this photo sharing project:

• 400 Photos // We took and posted 400 individual photos for the kick off of this series.  I would guess that maybe a third of our adults ended up in one of these photos.  Holding a slimy catfish was fun . . . but squeamish folks opted out despite our best efforts!  😉
  
• 17,036 Total Views // It was fun to watch as the photos went up on the Sunday evening how people jumped on them right away and started talking about them with their friends.  As they tagged them their friends where naturally quizative as to what was going on!
• 515 Unique Viewers // On each of the photos we linked back to the series page on our site.  In the week following the photo booth we sent over 500 unique viewers from these Facebook photos to this series page . . . this is almost all other traffic from Facebook to our site for this entire year!  
• 10,268 Friends Reached! // According to the Facebook analytics engine over ten thousands of “friends of our fans” saw at least one of these photos.  This number blew me away.  This is group that we are trying to reach as a church . . . the friends of our people.  Over 10,000 people got a glimpse at a fun moment in the life of our church.  I love it!

August has been a big month for us a Liquid.  In fact, it’s our largest year over year percentage growth that we’ve ever seen in the summer time.  It’s not just because of this Facebook photo booth campaign . . . but I’m sure this contributed to it!

What about your church?  Could you add a simple photo booth to something fun this fall and see if you could reach more of your “friends of fans” and invite them to your church?  [I’d love you hear your ideas . . . or even better about the results of your photo booth!]