BECAUSE:
- Anyone can set up an account in seconds; no tech knowledge is needed (though there are aspects of Facebook that are rather quirky and hard to use).
- It is based on relationships and dialogue – the key to effective sharing of the good news.
- Your comments and postings are displayed on friends’ pages.
- You can create or join ‘Fan Pages’ and ‘Groups’ built around secular topics, and therefore relate to others within a common interest (1 Cor. 9:19-23).
- It can leverage the power of other online resources such as video clips and outreach websites.
- Live our lives openly and transparently in front of our friends as we do in the physical world, demonstrating unconditional love and the fragrance spoken of in 2 Cor. 2:15.
- You can respond to other people’s postings with appropriate on-topic comments, sometimes including links to appropriate pages or video clips. Keep a portofolio list of pages and video clips ready to use. Consider inner pages from Power to Change – often one of their internal pages will relate to a specific topic you are commenting on: it also includes areas for men, women and students. Always do this in a sensitive and gentle way (1 Peter 3:15).
- If many of your friends live within your local community, it may be appropriate from time to time to mention activities at your church, as this video explains.
- You can upload your own video shorts into the video section of your Facebook profile, or post a link to a YouTube video in the same way as adding a hyperlink to any posting – a clickable thumbnail graphic will be automatically displayed. Short video clips a useful way to start discussions, especially if you link to conversation-starting videos rather than preachy ‘deal-closing’ presentations.
- Another fruitful area for conversations is popular culture – movie releases, music and books. Almost everyone is interested in talking about the latest films or music, and remarkably they frequently contain embedded parallels that point to spiritual truths.
- Create or join Fan Pages or Groups on topics that interest not-yet-believers and you, and participate sensitively. Look especially at Groups, because these are designed for ongoing member interaction, and are superseding the email discussion groups and bulletin boards that used to be so popular. There are vast numbers of Groups, some of them with very high membership. Use Facebook’s search option to find them. Is there, for instance, a Group covering a sport you are interested in, or a life problem or illness that you suffer with? Choose Groups with sufficient members to maintain an interesting ongoing conversation.
- Other intentional pro-active opportunities include making contact with friends of friends, and inviting people to join Fan Pages or Groups you are a member of.
- There are very few add-on ‘Applications’ that enable us to add gently evangelistic areas to a Facebook page – here is an opportunity for developers. Read more about ‘Applications’ and those that could be evangelistic.
- Learning Facebook’s markup language enables additional features to be added to a page.
- Facebook offers particular opportunities for mission agencies and cross-cultural witness: read more.
- Churches should consider the potential for creating a Fan Page: read more. A church Fan Page, like a normal church site, should be outsider-friendly (1 Col. 4:5) and jargon-free. Here are some useful examples.
- Many church youth groups conduct all their discussion and news distribution through a Facebook Group, because it’s so easy where 100% of young people have Facebook accounts.
- Under religious views on their Facebook profile, many people enter something like ‘Jesus follower’ or ‘seeker after truth’ rather than the increasingly pejorative ‘Christian’ or some denominational label.
- Don’t treat people as ‘gospel fodder’. Build unconditional relationships with respect and tolerance. Use integrity. It’s dialogue, not preaching. “The focus should be on building authentic relationships. Without it, not only do you run the risk of not being effective, but also in ruining any chance that other Christians might have,” says Dan King of Bibledude.com. “That’s why the most important thing that you can understand about social media is that it’s social in nature.”
- People will quickly see through insincerity and mixed motives. Cat owners know well the conditional affection shown by their pets when they want feeding: cupboard love. Facebook users will be less tolerant. They will quickly discern that you view them as ‘a project’ rather than a person.
- Some stategists have named inappropriate, strident, argumentative, manipulative or impersonal attempts to convince people of the truth with the chilling term un-evangelism.
- Avoid Chistrianese jargon. Express truths in alternate neutral language.
- Dont’t spend too much time on Facebook, or not use that time effectively. Read Top 9 Facebook Time Wasters to Avoid.
- Facebook is not always very intuitive to use or edit. It takes time to understand even the privacy settings and their implications. Realise that what you see on your Facebook page is not what visitors see: try viewing your page using a Facebook friend’s profile, and through the profile of someone who is not your friend, to see the differences.
- You can also learn how to use the Facebook Markup Language (FBML) to integrate other features into your Facebook Fan Page.
- There are daily limits on the number of people you can invite to be friends, and a very low limit on the number of messages you can send to non-friends. Such ‘cold-calling’ should be done with particular sensitivity.
- Use Google to find advice on all these areas – Facebook’s own documentation is often patchy. Some things you may find out by trial and error, for instance: you can only invite limited numbers of friends to a Fan Page at a time or the procedure fails, and that if their picture ceases to be ‘grayed out’ after you have done this, it means they have rejected (rather than ignored) the request, so do not send it again as it looks like you are spamming them.
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