Churches aren’t known for being early adapters and pastors specifically are notorious for being conservative in their methods.
Recent research from the Barna Group on churches and pastors and social media confirms this. They have titled their infographic ‘The rise of the @pastor’ but I think ‘The lagging behind of churches and pastors on social media’ would have been more apt, albeit less catchy.
Churches and Social Media
While there is a significant leap compared to two years ago in social media use, churches are still behind the curve when it comes to social media. For instance, only 70% of churches have a Facebook presence (and I bet that a large portion of these are fairly passive accounts). OK, that’s a 13% improvement compared to 2011, but if you ask me, that number should be around 100%.
If you look at individual pastors, 66% have a Facebook account. That’s a mere 7% increase since 2011. And only 23% of pastors are active on Twitter.
It seems to me that churches and pastors are missing a great opportunity to connect with their church family, and with ‘the world’. I can think of at least three reasons why pastors in particular should have an active online presence…but maybe I should write another blog post on that.
Check out this infographic for some more statistics and head over to the Barna site for some more data that they unfortunately didn’t include in the infographic.
[Click for Larger]
What do you think of these numbers?
[via Barna Group]
Lee Nickles says
If 23% of pastors are on twitter, then they’re above the average of general internet users, which is 16% (Source: http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2013/Social-media-users/Social-Networking-Site-Users/Demo-portrait.aspx ). So that actually seems high. It may or may not be worth it for a church to invest in something that a small slice of internet users even use.
The idea of a backchannel during a worship service is interesting. The possibility should make churches think through the nature of worship and what it should and shouldn’t include. And, implementing it requires additional resources and takes the people manning the system away from the worship service.
Rachel Blom says
You’re right, that 23% is higher than the Pew stats. However the 15% of Pew is taken off all Internet users, while that 23% is taken off all pastors. The question is then how many pastors aren’t active Internet users, because that might change the stats somewhat 🙂 Also, ‘all Internet users’ also include many, many kids, teens, elderly people and a much higher proportion of women than ‘all pastors’. That makes it a bit of a challenge to compare the stats.
But you’re right, it is more. It’s just that it’s not so much more than I think the term ‘@pastor’ is correct, let alone to speak of a rise. And my feeling after seeing this was more that churched and pastors aren’t using social media to its full potential. Just tweeting Bible verses for instance really isn’t gonna make much of a difference (and I mean no disrespect to the Bible!). It seems to me that a lot of churches and pastors still don’t ‘get’ social media en how they can use this to really connect with their own people and with their ‘neighbors’. But Maybe I ought to write another post about this and go into a bit more detail 🙂
Lee Nickles says
Point taken on the stats. And I think there are plenty of people besides pastors that don’t get how to harness social media beyond sharing vacation pics.
That would be a great (series of?) blog post(s)! Paul certainly made use of the transportation and messaging technologies of his day and we shouldn’t be afraid of them. Sharing examples of these done well would be helpful.
Brian James says
Thanks for the stats & insights. Very helpful as I encourage and coach other church leaders on the hows & whys of social media for ministry. I thought some of those reading this might also be interested in hearing about a related facet of social media ministry – the use of mobiles. Obviously the two go hand-in-hand. If you’re interested in learning more about the ways mobiles can be used in ministry, I encourage you to check out the Mobile Ministry Forum, a pan-agency network focused on this very topic: http://www.mobileministryforum.org.