3 Social Media Musts for Youth Ministry

on February 11th, 2010

Shared a few learnings about social media in the youth ministry track of Radicalis. Doug asked me to talk a little bit about getting community students into our crowd program, here’s some of what I jotted down in my Moleskin before jumping on stage:

Start to text your students immediately (SMS)
One of the very first moves I made when I became the High School Pastor at Saddleback was to move us quickly to texting. Email is dead to a teen. There are a ton of great texting services out there, we use SimplyTxt but you can check out Tatango, Duffled and more. Move to SMS right now, and please know it won’t be long before Facebook (and whatever’s next – ha!) ruins SMS as we know it, too.

Encourage students to update Facebook about their church experiences/decisions (Facebook)
I love it when a student updates their Facebook status with something about faith or church. We encourage it on a weekly basis – you can grab this promo slide and add it to your rotation this weekend, too. Their friendship circles extend far beyond yours, they have acquaintances that will see what they post and hopefully respond.

Don’t let your best stuff sit on a hard drive (YouTube)
Too often we work hard to create a powerful video or skit, play it for our students, then let it die a sad death in the corner of an old hard drive. Never again! Think about the latest video you created as an opportunity for social media marketing. When someone from your community searches Google or YouTube about your student ministry – what will they find? If you’re serious about taking some good first steps in social media for your student ministry, upload every video you can and let the community stumble on them and get in on the conversation.

JG


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Comments (3)

Josh in Michigan at 5:40pm February 11

I’m a big fan of Moleskin, but I’ve never tried to take notes on it. It’s great for blisters and hot spots, but it seems like a Moleskine notebook would be better for notes.
http://www.drscholls.com/drscholls/productSearch.do?method=doProductDetailsLookup&searchArg=67

Sorry, couldn’t resist. ;-)

Matthew McNutt at 6:55pm February 11

I’ve actually quit using Youtube; I put all my videos on facebook now. I wish it tracked views, but the advantage is that I can embed it everywhere, it doesn’t have a ton of other recommendations pop up or ads, and most importantly, as soon as I tag a kid in it, it’s part of their profile, they start commenting, they share it, etc. It feels like I reach a lot more of my teen audience that way!

And yes, texting is a must. If I don’t text it and facebook, teens don’t know about it!

Friday Five « Neil's Blog at 9:55am February 12

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