The church has had the capacity to be on the Internet for over 25 years, yet it seems we have failed to do anything very substantial for most of it. In the recent years, an explosion of churches have begun to make a digital presence online with website and social media, but are we being very effective with our energy and content? Here are some datapoints for you to explore on what 100 of the largest churches are doing online with their ministry presence. If you want the full data, get my latest eBook By The Numbers.
- 100% of churches post their physical address on their website while 99% of churches post their phone number.
- 69% of churches have a page on their website titled “About Us” and 76% with a page titled “Contact Us.”
- 33% of churches use outdated social media icons on their website.
- 52% of the top 100 churches have an Instagram account, but only 40% of them post a link on the homepage of their website.
- 94% of the top 100 churches have a Twitter account, but only 80% of them post a link on the homepage of their website.
- 94% of the top 100 churches have a Facebook account, but only 82% of them post a link on the homepage of their website.
- The average number of Likes a Facebook page has is 14,962
- The average number of followers a Twitter account has is 7,262
- The average number of followers an Instagram account has is 3,021
- 62% of churches use custom church hashtags with their Instagram posts.
- Over half of the churches with an Instagram account use branding on at least a couple of their images a month.
How does your church’s social media platforms stack up to the largest churches in America?
Could your digital presence use some work?
Eric J says
Yep I see the old twitter & YouTube logo all the time, and to a lesser extent the old G+ logo. By the way Churchm.ag is using the old YouTube logo 😉
http://www.youtube.com/yt/brand/downloads.html
Eric Dye says
Dang it. At least we’re not using the old Twitter logo. 😉
Jeremy Smith says
🙂 I didn’t track YouTube, Vimeo, or some others, but let’s just say if I would have extended the survey to all social media platform icons, the number would have been even higher
Dave Shrein says
Nice breakdown. Any stats anywhere on how many of these churches are current on content? Specifically on Twitter… when was the last time they posted and then when was the last time they had consistent posting? I find Twitter to be the most difficult to keep up with as it relates to an organization.
Jeremy Smith says
Dave, the reason this is tough is “what is consistent and current?” At least once a week, at least once a day, etc? Plus there is intentionality and actuality. I only care about actuality within the quantitative part of this study (this infographic and the ebook) but the intentionality is next with the qualitative study. If we go by business standards, I could give you an answer, but I do not like trying to compare businesses with ministries because the overall purpose and standard is different fundamentally. So the hope is that we can actually use the data from this whole year and define what the standard might be, at least from the largest churches in America.
Any pushback to this?