One of the first uses by youth workers has been to advertise for youth group meetings as well as outreach events. This is one way to expand your student base without too much planning or time. Many times, your students will invite their own friends to your ministry page that you have never met.
- Event RSVP
Through our Facebook group, I sometimes create events and send invitations all the youth group kids to RSVP as “attending,” “not attending” or “maybe attending.” Even though we have sign-ups on our website, too, when people join an event in Facebook, it shows up in all their friends’ news feed and gives the event some free publicity to other students who otherwise might not know about it. Of course, they can easily check out more details of the event and sign-up to attend, too, if they’d like. - Prepare Students For The Lesson
One of the greatest things you could do in preparation through the week for your youth group talk is help the students get in the mindset. On your ministry’s Facebook page, post the main and secondary Scripture for the week, pre-questions and follow up questions, and any promo videos and banners for the teaching series. This allowed them to be thinking about the talk long before you start and after you finish. - Do Not Make This Your Only Line of Communication
Yes, it is 2011, but I have SO MANY middle school students who are NOT on Facebook. To that point, I have many parents that do not even understand what Facebook is meant to be. (Should I point them to the Scoial Network movie?) Facebook “advertising” should be only one of many different ways to interact with students and I would go as far as saying should not be in the top three best ways to communicate to students. Nothing beats face-to-face conversations with students and parents, a hand-written note implies effort and thought, and flyers can be hung on a refrigerator.
Steve Steiner says
As a practical case and point, there have been times that we have given out fliers and free stuff campus wide to try to generate student attention, and got total hits for our site in the 20’s. Then a day or two later by leveraging Facebook, we will have hits climb dramatically to the 80 – 100 range, and using Google Analytics we can see that most of this traffic for these student ministry websites is coming from Facebook.
So what is the difference? One way we leverage Facebook is merely by having our student leaders click the Like button for our pages. This is also an example of why it is a lot better to have a page than a group, but I digress. Anyway just a real life example of how we have successfully used Facebook in cooperation with students, to let their peers know about us.
Jeremy Smith says
Great insight. I love it. Thanks for that!
Erasmo says
Huge lover of this page, lots of your blog posts have seriously helped me out. Awaiting posts!
Jeremy Smith says
Erasmo, glad to hear! Appreciate the comments.