An online home for your Christian ministry can help you reach out to people that you may not have ordinarily met, facilitate deeper conversations, build community, and increase the level of engagement and involvement among the people already involved with your ministry. But with so many options out there on the world wide web, knowing where to start can be a little daunting. It can also be overwhelming thinking that you need to a create community on every social media platform that exists (like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, or a blog), especially when it seems like there’s a new social media darling cropping up every six months.

This screencast will give you a framework to help you think through where you should start, in terms of social media and the online world, and how you should prioritize your time so that your online presence can be as focused as possible.

In most cases, a custom blog or website will make the most sense for an online home base because of the level of consistency, customization, and control it offers you. But in other cases, an online home base on an established social network like Facebook might make more sense because of Facebook’s ease of use, and because of the huge numbers of people already on it. To find the online home base that makes the most sense for your ministry, you’ll want to think through these questions:

• What are the goals of your online presence?
• Where do the people you want to connect with spend their online time?

For example, if you are in college ministry in the US, it might make sense to use a Facebook page as your home base since the students you’d be ministering to spend most of their time on Facebook already. It can also be very challenging to get people to leave their Facebook ecosystems to go to your website. So rather than creating an online island and hoping people show up, it may make sense for your ministry to live where your audience lives. Sure, you lose some control with Facebook, but the potential of connecting with a much larger group of people in the ecosystem where they’re spending the most time could be well worth it.