Using Social Media in the Local Church

The local church is comprised of a community of people of varying degrees of participation and dedication. The community is drawn together by the mission of the local church – the Great Commission which commands the church to go and make disciples as followers of Jesus. The church will seek to fulfill the Great Commission in a variety of ways. The Great Commission has a definite social element involved and therefore should examine the Social Media as part of the church’s strategy.

The intranet’s core technology was conceived as a social medium. Email, the origination point for social computing, got started 39 years ago. Discussion groups and file sharing got started 30 years ago as USENET. “Talk”, a real-time chat program like Yahoo! Messenger and AOL Instant Messenger arrived on the scene 26 years ago. And now venerable World Wide Web made its debut two decades ago. The Internet has developed from being social to becoming actively social. The sheer number of people who enjoy and participate in social media makes it compelling, The church members and future members are out there sharing photos, making connections, telling stories, giving advice and watching videos.

• There are more the 2.9 billion emails accounts
• More than 400 million Facebook users.
• 13 billion photos on Facebook and Flickr alone
• More than 161 million visits per month on Twitter
• 133 million blogs

The initial step should be to examine how the local church should get started and to prepare how the media should be used within the organization.

Questions to examine.

1. How can my church use social media to pursue specific objectives?
2. What are the risks, and how can they be managed?
3. What are some examples of social media techniques that have provided real results?
4. How do we know what’s being accomplished?
   

The seven categories of social media

1. Publishing Platforms – these consists of platforms and tools that allow the author to set the content of the initial publication and allow others to add commends or to link using RSS feeds. Examples: Blogs, Podcasts and VLogs or Video Blogs.
2. Social Networking Sites – these allow for the users to interact by becoming friends and/or sharing favorites. This allows for the people to connect to others. Examples YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, MySpace and Facebook
3. Democratized Content Networks – these sites allow all users to contribute equally and to vote for the best content. Examples: Digg, NewPR, Wikipedia.
4. Virtual Networking Platforms – these often require third party interfaces. Examples: Second Life and There.com
5. Information Aggregators – these are publicly available machine driven aggregators of niche content, usually with some human interaction . Examples: Techmeme and Power 150 Kitchen Sink.
6. Editing Social News Platforms – these are sites which users can recommend other links and can make comments on the stories. Examples: Fark and Spin Thicket
7. Content Distribution Sites – sites allow the users create, collect and/or share content and distribute them through RSS, code and email. Examples Scrapdogg, Del;.icio.us and Clearspring
   

Through a series of blog posting, I will examine how several Social Media elements can be utilized by the local church.