The Facebook Effect (In Ministry)

Statistics  (from Facebook's page)
People on Facebook

• More than 400 million active users
• 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
• Average user has 130 friends
• People spend over 500 billion minutes per month on Facebook
• Activity on Facebook
• There are over 160 million objects that people interact with (pages, groups and events)
• Average user is connected to 60 pages, groups and events
• Average user creates 70 pieces of content each month
• More than 25 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
• Over 300,000 users helped translate the site through the translations application

Mobile

• There are more than 100 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
• People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice more active on Facebook than non-mobile users.
• There are more than 200 mobile operators in 60 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products

So, gone are the days when it was novel for a church or ministry to be on FACEBOOK or any given social media.  It was novel and trendy but now according to these statistics, it has become necessary for any ministry to have a presence in the social media scene to keep up.

Talking with a friend today about the future of ministry, one position that we agreed upon that was up and coming was a social media person who maintains a ministries presence in the social media stream (Twitter, FB, Linkedin, etc) and one who manages the communication stream to make sure that all are sending a consistent message.

I've seen in the last two years how social media has impacted ministry through: 1) prayer requests 2) ministry opportunities 3)ministry needs shared and experienced together online (mission trips, camps, etc) 4) connections with other Christians around the world (it's getting smaller) and more.

Does your ministry have a social media presence?  Does someone manage that and if so, how much has that job grown in the past year and will continue to grow into the future.