Having been the son of a Preacher and growing up in the pews of the church, I have a pretty good perspective on life in the ministry. Pastors have so many things on their plate that it can be quite overwhelming. You have a member of your church that is in the hospital, a couple fighting and asking for counsel, get prepared for your Sunday sermon, and oh yeah spend time with his family. The same can be said of traveling ministers/evangelists. Constantly on the road, studying, praying, and squeezing in family time. It can be a daunting task of raising a family, leading a church, and trying to keep up with the scary new world of technology.
It used to be that ministries could just focus on the church and community outreach. Then in the 90’s, your youth would start coming up to you and talking about the Internet. Well, all you heard at that time was how evil the Internet was. Technology had to go through a reputation cycle much like what Money went through. First it was evil. Then we realized that it wasn’t evil, but a Tool. A tool, if used properly, could expand the Kingdom.
Ministries started to have websites built. I worked for a company that built websites for thousands of churches and saw how slow and hard this transition was for so many church leaders. They knew they had to embrace this new technology, but feared how to correctly do so and keep the main thing the main thing.
Fast forward to today. You feel good that your ministry has a great website and then all the sudden something called Social Media becomes prevalent in discussions at conferences all across the country. I talked to several who were so frustrated that they must again adapt to the changing culture to keep a relevant voice.
What is really behind Social Media and why should I care?
Social Media has become the fastest growing medium in history. Social Media is an umbrella term that defines the various activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos, and audio. Social media can take many different forms, including forums, weblogs, social blogs, microblogging, wikis, podcasts, pictures, video, rating, and social bookmarking.
Social media literally empowers your ministry to reach outside the four walls of your church! The Word and purpose God has put on your life can go beyond the people sitting in your pews on Sunday morning. It can reach a family across the globe today. Most likely you already know this, but it can be very overwhelming for one just coming into the knowledge of it and how to get started.
Focus on the Big 3 at first
There are literally thousands of social sites, there are only a few that ministries should absolutely have a presence. Those are Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube.
Some numbers you should know about…
People on Facebook
- More than 500 million active users
- 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
- Average user has 130 friends
- People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook
Activity on Facebook
- There are over 900 million objects that people interact with (pages, groups, events and community pages)
- Average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events
- Average user creates 90 pieces of content each month
- More than 30 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each month.
Global Reach
- More than 70 translations available on the site (
- About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States
- Attracts 190 million visitors per month
- Generates 65 million Tweets a day
- People are watching 2 billion videos a day on YouTube
- Upload hundreds of thousands of videos daily
- Every minute, 24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube.
THERE IS NO NEED TO FEAR, THERE IS HELP
The best thing you can do is just get started one at a time. There is certainly an art to doing Social Media correctly, but first you just need to get out there and do it. Most sites have help forums and instructions that can lead you down the right path. You can also google for help.
Most are finding that the best decision they made on their online presence/properties was that of getting experts to partner with them. True Potential Media would love the opportunity to speak with you about your ministry and how we may be able to help. True Potential Media can assist your ministry with your website, social media, search engine marketing, online P.R., and ministry product expansion.
God called you to the ministry…He called us to partner with you and as partners expand the Kingdom of God with His Good News! Fill out our contact form for a free consultation and see where God leads us.