Social Media Volunteering

Social media continues to fascinate me every day. It is absolutely everywhere and is becoming the new reality that we all must live in! Get this:

• Facebook has over 845 million active users
• Twitter has over 465 million active users, and is growing at a rate of 11 new accounts per second.
• There are over 1 billion Facebook posts a day
• Over 175 million tweets are sent per day on Twitter
• Over 250 million photos are uploaded to Facebook every day

And there is a really good chance that all these statistics have totally changed by the time you are reading this blog.

So what’s the point? The point is that as a youth volunteer, the students in your youth group spend way more time with you on social media compared to the time they spend with you at a youth service or event. Students are paying way more attention than you think to your status updates, tweets, photos, or inactivity for that matter. I’m not saying that you can only minister to students on social media versus face-to-face, but what I am trying to get across is that we all have a message resonating from our social media accounts to this next generation.

Questions: Are the messages you are sending through social media congruent to the message you send face to face when you are volunteering and serving at a youth service? Are your posts, pictures, likes, comments, and content you are sharing on social media enhancing the messages that the youth pastors are speaking on a weekly basis or hindering it?

Whether we like it or not, we are all responsible to be great social media volunteers in our youth group!

Students are watching…what message are you sending?

-Eric