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Over the past couple of years, social media has grown into a highly utilized communication tool. The top social media heavy weights are facebook, twitter, youtube, and flickr. The undisputed champion of the world would definitely be facebook. Currently, Facebook has over 350 million users with about 100 million users in the United States. Twitter has also become a force to be reckoned with; it presently has 45 million users worldwide.

Over the past couple of years, social media has grown into a highly utilized communication tool. The top social media heavy weights are facebook, twitter, youtube, and flickr. The undisputed champion of the world would definitely be facebook. Currently, Facebook has over 350 million users with about 100 million users in the United States. Twitter has also become a force to be reckoned with; it presently has 45 million users worldwide.

In 2009, major companies began to understand the power of social media. Today, you will find that most serious companies have some type of social media presence. Social media allows the online world to interact with a companies brand via videos, comments, pictures, etc. Just recently, Comscore, a digital monitoring company, has found that the push for social media is just not hype but can help a company improve their bottom line.

What does this mean to the Youth Pastor? It means that most of your youth group is involved with social media and now is the time to take advantage of it.

Here are some steps to get you started with social media:

—- Connect with your youth group via social media. Start with what you know. If you are on Facebook, try to friend your youth group members and if you are on Twitter, try to follow.

—-Talk to your youth group and find out what other types of social media websites they are using.Most likely members of your youth group are on Facebook but they  may mention sites that you’ve heard about. It is even possible that many of your youth are still big MySpace users.

—-Get some brand advocates from your youth group. Find out who would like to help you in creating social media spaces for the youth group. They can help you with posting videos, comments, pictures, events, etc.

—-Create a name for your youth group. Part of your goal is to create a name for your group on social media, so why not make it a good one? You could allow your youth to vote on names in order to get them involved in the planning process.

—-Decide on what type of content you are going to publish and when you’re going to post it. It is good to have unscheduled random content published but to keep people engaged, you must publish regular engaging content. For instance, you could decide every Wednesday you will post youth event photos, a new gospel video, or an invite to your weekly youth event. If you post engaging content like photos, the content will be shared with others by your youth. In this way, you will be able to draw other youth to join your group and maybe get closer to having these youth to come out to one of your events.

—-Create your social media spaces using similar colors, images, descriptions, etc. Visitors to your different social media spaces should be able to tell it is the same group. If unsure what media spaces are right for you, then you should start with a Facebook Fan Page.

—-Once the social media spaces are created, get your youth to join (become a fan, follower, etc.)

—-Don’t Give Up! It may take sometime to get traffic to your social media spaces, but stay encouraged and keep these spaces up to date