Using Facebook Groups To Reach More People For Christ!!
In this post, we are discussing how Facebook Groups will help get your message to more people. We are gonna talk about the benefits of having a Facebook Group for your church and what that would bring to your church. Now of course, our main goal is to get more people, more eyeballs, more ears listening, looking, and participating with your message. One way to achieve that goal is having a Facebook Group. We are not going to go into details of how to set it up but we’re just gonna talk about it and present you reasons to enjoy the benefits of a Facebook Group.
Facebook Group for Discipleship
So at our church, we used Facebook Group to get time sensitive announcements out. So if we have unexpected things to come up, we put it in our Facebook Group. The great thing about Facebook Group is that it’s guaranteed to notify everybody on the group. What it does is it sends out a little notification so it doesn’t matter whether you are on a computer or on your mobile, the bottomline is everybody on the group gets notified a 100% guaranteed to see your message.
Facebook Group for Ministry and Fellowship
You can also use Facebook Groups for prayer ministry. At our church, we get out prayer requests from all those people who had gotten ill. It’s one great way to get that across really quickly to all members. It is also a great tool to grow your group, your church family together. Facebook Groups also work great in developing fellowship among group members. I mean members can talk about different things and they can get to know each other.
Facebook Group for Worship
You’re maybe thinking how would a Facebook Group help enhance worship in your church. Well we are here to tell you that USTREAM could integrated with Facebook. So you could use Facebook to stream your services live to your congregation, to people that are sick at home and also to those younger adults who are looking for church in places to plug in, if they come across your Facebook Page, they can see that you’re streaming your church service. Now that’s another way to engage people who are not engaging in church. Now, just for more clarification, Facebook Groups are not able to stream directly to group members but what you can do is go into your group and announce that you are going to stream your church service in your Facebook Page and it’s a guarantee that everybody on the group will get the announcement.
Conclusion
Facebook Groups have lots of benefits and each and every one of it is a reason why you should be using a Facebook Group for your church ministry. Every church’s goal is to reach more people and with Facebook Groups, achieving that goal will just be a few clicks away.
Curtis says
Can someone compare and contrast Facebook Groups with a Facebook Page, and when and how each might be used by a church? And when and how each should *not* be used?
Chad Gleaves says
Sure,
In its simplest form.
Facebook pages are for reaching out to the community and you must pay to reach out through ads and promotion of posts. The main advantage is the ability to grow the group. The main disadvantage is that without spending money, a page will only reach 20% of its “likes”!! So Facebook actually limits how many people see your post to 20% unless you are willing to pay.
Facebook groups are for internal groups like Deacon groups or Sunday School Groups. The main benefit of groups is that 100% of your group sees every post you make through Facebook notifications. The main disadvantage of groups is that you can not advertise through Facebook Ads or Promote a post.
Chad Gleaves
Darryl Schoeman says
Hi Chad
This is an interesting post and I’m eager to learn more. I manage my Church’s Facebook page and have seen that not all of their fans actually see the page’s posts. The figure at the bottom of the post is never as high as the page’s likes. Prior to this post, I simply wrote it off to them either not being online, not being active, or them selecting not to show the posts in their news feed.
Your stat on Facebook only pushing out page posts to 20% of their fans is both interesting and concerning, and will greatly impact a Church’s social media strategy. Do you have a source to corroborate this figure (online article or blog post or something)?
Curtis says
Facebook uses an algorithm they call “EdgeRank” to determine which items to display on a person’s newsfeed. This is analogous to Google’s mysterious PageRank algorithm that decides what search results to display. There is an article about EdgeRank here http://www.epiphaniesinc.com/blog/2012/06/really-getting-your-facebook-page-seen-in-news-feeds/
But in brief, it says “Unfortunately, there’s no way for Pages to guarantee that they can be seen in people’s News Feeds.” You can do things to try to increase the frequency of your page updates showing up on newsfeeds, but there is no way to guarentee it.
Whether the amount of people who sees updates is exactly 20% or not is hard to say, because EdgeRank is secret, and EdgeRank is changing all the time so its behavior is unpredictable. Some people would argue that Facebook makes EdgeRank unpredictable on purpose, to encourage people to pay for more ads, which can increase a page’s appearance on newsfeeds dramatically.
That is one big advantage of groups. Every group member gets group updates displayed on their newsfeed, without having to pay for ads.
Darryl Schoeman says
Thanks for the reply Curtis. I know of EdgeRank but have not read too much into it, especially because it is changing all the time. But I will look at your link.
This really is a social media strategy crusher. I would personally hate it to get a notification of every page/group post; it’ll clutter up my notifications feed which I use to know who is engaging with my posts. Yet may consider changing becasue of teh 100% notification.
This post has caused (forced) me to investigate this further.
Navin says
Have you heard of thetableproject.org? Custom, private social network for the church. We just rolled it out and so far people are loving it.
Darryl Schoeman says
Not me. But my view on social (media) networking is not about keeping our content private. We want to spread the Gospel, not only remind other Christians about it.
Navin says
The purpose of The Table is not to “remind other Christians about (the Gospel) it.” It is a platform that allows people in our church to communicate prayer requests and praises, volunteer opportunities and much more. There are a lot of people who attend our church and often times someone I meet on a Sunday I might not see in a long time because I usually attend the Saturday night service.
It’s a way to connect during the week. Feel free to go to thetableproject.org and check it out if you haven’t yet.
Darryl Schoeman says
Sorry. My mistake. When I saw the words custom and private, it invoked thoughts of exclusiveness. And this is not beneficial to the Church.
A Social Media strategy is key to any Church’s WPO (Web Presence Optimisation strategy) which in turn is key to their SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) strategy. Facebook pages are indexed by search engines because they are publicly visible. When you said private, I immediately assumed that the content is not visible and therefore not searchable.
Another key aspect of a social media strategy is the ability to share the content with both believers and unbelievers. We do not know which seed it is that the Holy Spirit is going to allow to take root and grow. So we must spread the seed. Again, my thought concerns are centred on the word private and the ability to be able to do this.
That said, I will take a look. Maybe there is more the Table than meets the eye (or ear or brain for that matter).
Thanks for the lead.
Eric Dye says
We LOVE what the folks at The Table Project are doing!