Facebook evangelism: Don’t just "Like"... "Share"!

With the enormous popularity of Facebook, we have a great opportunity for what I want to call “Facebook evangelism.” This is possible by using the “Share” option built into Facebook’s operating system.

But first, we need to get over our innate shyness in sharing what is great about our church. And second, we need to set up our web sites so sharing can take place.

It’s almost legendary that we don’t have any problem with sharing our thoughts about a great movie or our favorite restaurant. But there is a certain reserve about sharing what we love about our faith or the churches in which we find expression of that faith.

Facebook helps melt that reserve. With a click of the mouse, we can “Share” a post about something happening in our congregation, which will then show up on our friends’ news feeds, hopefully to give them a sense of the joy and wonder we have found.

We all have seen how well sharing works. Consider for a moment all the cute cat pictures, the photos of meals about to be eaten, and the links to online publications’ articles of interest which arrive in our news feeds, shared by our friends.

Increasingly, images of beautiful prayers, words of inspiration, even cartoons poking fun at our vanities are being shared. It’s all good.

But what is being shared about how St. Swithin’s is helping to feed the hungry in our county? Or is starting a new survivors group? Or is hosting an interfaith dialogue? Items such as these and hundreds more can be shared if we take the next step: putting a “Share” link on our web pages.

Every church web page with information about the exciting, compelling, interesting stuff happening in the life of the congregation should have a “Share” link which enables Facebook users to promote that page to their personal news feed which then, depending on the privacy settings, will appear on their friends news feeds.

Congregations whose website is provided by the Church Website Project have the “Share” function already built in. If your congregation is using a commercial website provider, ask the company to place a “Share” link on your templates. If you are the webmaster for your congregation’s website, the following snippet of code can be inserted in the code view:

<a href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php" name="fb_share" id="fb_share" type="button">Share</a> <script src="http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/connect.php/js/FB.Share" type="text/javascript"></script>

Let the good news sharing begin!