How many of these social media outlets does your church use to reach people? Please remember that Facebook is not a substitute for your church website!
“People and churches can be ignorant of what they don’t perceive to be relative or relevant to them. This leads to apathy and indifference, and I don’t know and I don’t care attitude, that can lead a church to become stagnant and ineffective in reaching people for the cause of Christ.”
I recently watched a podcast that discussed how to leverage technology and particularly Facebook to reach the unchurched and dechurched person, or guests. Here are the following statistics relative to advertising on Facebook:
- Facebook has approximately 2.38 billion-plus monthly active users.
- 1.56 billion users plus daily log on to Facebook.
- The average user is on Facebook 8 times per day for a 20-minute visit.
- 80% of 18-24-year-olds are on Facebook immediately after waking up.
When it comes to the cost of placing an ad on Facebook and before sharing a few cost statistics with you here is a website link that provides you with more statistics for your consideration. Go to https://karolakarlson.com/facebook-ads-cost-and-bidding/ and check out the graphs relative to ad placement.
As of September 2019, the CPC or cost-per-click was $0.22 and the CPM or cost-per-thousand was $5.12. Another way to look at the incredible pricing of advertising on Facebook is to be mindful of the following statistics:
- The average church family in America gives or tithes $5900 per year, which in and of itself is a sad statistic. The church could do so much more if we as God’s people were to give more.
- If direct mail is used by the church it costs approximately $200 per 1000 people.
- Using Facebook at the September 2019 CPM or cost-per-thousand you will spend $5.12. The return difference is astronomical.
We are living in the age of the Connected Generation, with Millennials being the most diverse group in history. The church must take advantage of social media along with updated websites to successfully reach our unchurched generations. David Kinnaman, author and President and Strategic Leader of The Barna Group has noted that “today’s generation needs an emotionally connected church. He notes that today’s young adults don’t want Christianity just to be true, but that they all want to understand that it is good.”
Let us as representatives of Jesus Christ, as his church, make use of the many available social media platforms we have in this digital age to reach people with the claims of Christ. Can you imagine what the apostle Paul would have given to have had at his disposal all the means of communicating the gospel message at his fingertips that we have today? Finally, having said all this let us remember that social media and websites do not make up for developing personal relationships with people.
The connected generation doesn’t want to be consumers, they want to be distributors. Isn’t that what we as Christians and Christ followers are to be?