The Like button on Facebook seems trivial but can be a powerful tool for online ministry. Seriously. Everything added or subtracted to Facebook has a clear purpose: “To help you connect and share with friends.”
What happens when you like something?
- The post/photo/video that you liked get “pushed” to the newsfeed of all of your friends, making that item less anonymous.
- It increases the chances that the post will be featured in “Top News” section of the newsfeed, which keeps stories up for a longer time than “Most Recent”
- If that story/photo/video that you liked happens to be on a fan page or group page then Facebook will aggregate (bring into your newsfeed) other stories liked on that fan page.
Ways to use the Like button for ministry:
- For your key events make sure you get as many people as possible to like the post. I do this at Chico by texting my student leaders and asking them to Like it, and then text some others who will do the same. If the event is not Liked or commented on, then the chances of someone seeing it their newsfeed is reduced, since they would have to be looking at their feed around the time that it was posted.
- Put some incentives around people Liking a post on your wall. Example: We raffled off something at our meeting from the people who liked or commented on a particular post on our fan page. The purpose was to get less involved students to interact with our fan page, so that in the future it would increase their chances of seeing posts from our fan page on their wall. If you join a fan page but do not interact with its content the chances of you seeing content from that page are decreased.
This post from Campus Crusade’s Fan page showed up in my Top News feed because I interact with the page often.
Here’s an example of Chico CRU’s fan page that received a few likes. Remember this is significant because these interactions play a significant part in spreading this content across the fans and friends of fans of this page.
To read more about the button:
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
This is such a simple way to get any kind of message out there! Does commenting have less, more, and/or equal effect on getting your posts noticed?
no commenting and liking are “equal’ so to speak.
i know that the more a person engages a fan page, group page, or person the more likely that content will show up in their “top news” feed in the future, even if someone else does not like or comment on that post.