- Founder is Mark Zuckerberg. Mark was a Harvard student who was looking for a tool to connect students at the university. The irony is that many times he can be a social introvert and prefers to operate behind the scenes.
- Over 500 million people have a Facebook account.
- On any given day, over half of the users log on.
- The average user has 130 friends.
- Over 200 million people access Facebook through a mobile device.
- Over 70% of Facebook users are outside the U.S.
- Facebook is estimated to be worth $50 billion dollars.
- It is estimated that there will be over 1 billion people on Facebook by 2012.
Connection. Want to connect with your volunteers? Go where they are...Facebook. You are much more likely to connect with them through Facebook now than you are by email. What a great opportunity it provides to connect with your volunteers outside the walls of the church in a personal way.
Major corporations have caught onto this. Target, Toys R' Us, JC Penney, and thousands of other companies are using Facebook to connect with their customers.
Communication. Want to get a buzz going about an upcoming event? Need to remind your volunteers about the weekend schedule? Want to give parents talking points they can use to help disciple their children during the week? Have a prayer request you want others on the team to join you in prayer about? Facebook is one of the main avenues to effectively communicate these types of things.
Celebration. A Kidmin Facebook page is a great place to post pictures of events, celebrate volunteers, share praise reports, and rejoice over answers to prayer.
Community. You can build community with a KidMin Facebook page. It's a great way to help your volunteers become a team as they interact and share with each other.
Challenge. Do you have a hard time getting volunteers to show up for training? Bring the training to them. Post training notes on the page. Better yet, grab a video camera and record some short teaching/training videos and post them on the page.
Cost. It's free. Simple. Easier to maintain than your own webpage.
We recently started a Facebook page for our KidMin. Many of our volunteers are joining the group and we're already seeing the benefits of all of the above. You can see it here.
If you have a Facebook page for your KidMin, would enjoy hearing some tips, ideas, and feedback on how it's helping your ministry.
Posted by Dale Hudson
