Media Outreach

In my last post, I tried to differentiate the differences between groups and pages on Facebook.  I defined a page and a group and hopefully made it a little less confusing for you in trying to decide which one to create…or maybe you decided to create both.

When it comes to Facebook groups, I’m extremely picky about which ones I become a member of. There are several reasons for this.

1. All the group updates can be overwhelming to your news feed.
2. I like to keep my Facebook page as clean as possible- keep the clutter of unnecessary groups off my page.
3. I’ve decided that my personal Facebook page is for me to keep up with the people in my life that I want to keep up with. Not a place to be bombarded by junk…my E-mail accounts get enough of that.

With that said, I do realize that there are some very useful ways in which to use Facebook groups…especially for churches. In fact, I’ve even recently created one for my small group.

My church has taken full advantage of using Facebook groups to help connect our singles and newly married group. Look- they even have information about the Facebook page on the website. In fact- I’m in a picture on the right side…see if you can find me. (HINT: Think “crouching tiger, hidden dragon”)

My small group has about 20 people in it. During our main discussions, we split the guys and girls up. The girl’s group has decided that we want to keep up with each other’s lives throughout the week and have a place to post our weekly prayer requests. So…I created a Facebook group for this. I made the group a “secret” group which only allows me to invite members and the information posted in the group is only visible to the group members. This makes a safe place for group members to post a prayer request.

Why did we choose a Facebook group to do this?

1. It’s less hassle than getting a string of Emails in your Inbox and having to cipher through them.
2. This allows us to post weekly prayer requests and then go back and look how God has answered those requests. It’s a simple way of keeping track of what God is doing in each of our lives.
3. We can send out notes of encouragement to each other throughout the week.

This is just one way we’re using Facebook groups to our advantage.

Other ways to use them:

• Small group- allow people to see what’s going on in your small group and to send out announcements to members.
• Keep a large group informed about what’s going on in the church. Here’s one of my church’s groups.
• Allow members to post events that other members might be interested in
• Use the discussion board to generate discussions about the Sunday morning sermon
• Post pictures
• Create events
• The list could go on…

How is your church using them? I’d love to know…

Photo By: Spencer E Holtway