If anyone still has any doubts or hesitations about the Church being present in social media, this video should lay them to rest.
Here are 16 social media stats that stood out to me as particularly insightful for Catholics and our Church:
1) “By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers…96% of them have joined a social network.” Are we meeting them where they’re at?
2) “Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web.”
3) “1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media.”
4) “If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest.” Do we need an “Archdiocese of Facebook”? :-)
5) “On average, online students out perform those receiving face-to-face instruction.” Is the Church teaching online as much as we could?
6) “80% of companies use LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees.” Still looking for a job anyone? How about is your parish using LinkedIn to find the most qualified and passionate employees?
7) “What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, etc.” Thank goodness for the confessional.
8) “Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica.” Have Catholics been writing these articles? Contributing to them? Making sure they are correct?
9) “There are over 200,000,000 Blogs.” How many of them are Catholic?
10) “Facebook USERS translated the site from English to Spanish via a Wiki in less than 4 weeks and cost Facebook $0.” How can the Catholic Church or the parish accomplish such feats on limited budgets?
11) “78% of consumers trust peer recommendations.” How many peers are recommending the Catholic Church on social media?
12) “25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video…on their phone.” Is the Church doing enough to create these videos? And to create them well?
13) “35% of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle when available.” How many of our great Catholic treasures (books) have been digitized and made available on the Kindle and other electronic formats?
14) “24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news, the news finds us.” Are we as a Church going out and finding people? Or are we just waiting for people to find us?
15) “More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook…daily.” How many of them reflect the Gospel? How many share the fullness of Truth?
16) “Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy - listening first, selling second.” Is the Catholic Church present enough in social media to be listening? And are we listening first?
For the next generation, the social web is defining sex, marriage and family. The Church must be a force there. The social web is on the cutting edge of education and communication. The Church must be on that edge. The social web is developing the language that future generations will speak. The Church must speak it fluently. Social media is changing the world. The Church must be fully present there to help guide that change.
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It’s truly crazy, isn’t it? The Internet is bigger than the printing press was. In fact, it’s possibly the biggest game changer ever.
Erik Qualman is great. I use him as one of my sources in my thesis.
I’m looking forward to that thesis, Angela!
Very interesting article. I created a FB account in order to stay connected in the lives of hundreds of teens from our High School Youth Group. We (The leadership) use social media to stay ‘in touch’ with them, what is happening, what is relevant, what is troubling, and to plan activities, communicate, and minister. Having read the article though, it makes me wonder what additional opportunities are out there for live chats, appologetics sessions, on line bible study, etc…. hmmmmm… What would a Jesus blog have in it?.... What would a Jesus podcast contain…. worth looking in to!
Very intersting article. I would love to use a Kindle to read books, but a majority of the books I read (Catholic related) aren’t available as Kindle books!
We shouldn’t put too much stock in the latest trends, after all, people have a strange way of reverting back to more primitive forms of communication and interaction. Today’s wave of the future will be tomorrow’s remember when… Let’s stay up-to-date, but not forget that old fashion one on one interaction is always relevant and never antiquated.
How interesting! Great post, Matt! I am excited to pass this along to Father Barron and the Word on Fire team.
Matt! You are singing my song! Every diocese needs an IT professional making stuff in concert with these trends happen, then every parish! This post is a great reference. And I do not think we need to abandon traditional means of communication- face to face, voice to voice, person to person, or print media- but we need to get with the program, even if we are going to do it in Latin!
To connect with the young generation you really need to use the social media!
Really loved the article added to my favourites
What a coincidence!? I just fond this article, and the newer one about social networking. What’s cool is the timing. I was just talking with some homeschooling mom friends at our art class about this very subject. Please help with some insight to my quandary!!!!! How do I justify being part of, say, Facebook, when I read that there is a tremendous amount of horrifically objectionable material on it, along with all the ‘good’?
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