I’m an avidreader, I read multiple books a week and I’m always reading something. We own about 2,500 books and we’ve had to invest in bookcases throughout our house to shelve them all. There’s no smell I love more than the smell of books. I’ve worked in a used bookstore and every time I came in for work, I would just take a deep breath and savor the smell of ink, of paper, of dusty covers and paper. I loved that job, just being between books all day.

And despite my love for real, physical books, I love my Kindle . I admit, when the first e-book readers came out, I was very skeptical. After all, there’s nothing like the smell and touch and feel of a book in your hands. How could something electronic ever replace that?

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It was a lesson he learned from his father. When Rudolph Guiliani was a boy, his father taught him the importance of going to funerals and wakes. Hs father never missed a single funeral in his life, he always showed up. Young Rudy accompanied his dad and he saw how much it meant to friends and neighbors that they were there. ‘My father defined himself by helping people when they need him the most’, Guiliani remembers in his book Leadership. His father taught him: weddings are discretionary, funerals mandatory.

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This post is part of the Series on Social Media in Youth Ministry. After reading yesterday’s post on what to post on your social media, you may have asked yourself how you are ever going to find all that content to post. That’s why today we are discussing 8 ways to find great social media content for your youth ministry page, (Tumblr)blog or site.

1. Google Alert

A great way to find relevant content to share (like blogs, posts, articles, etc) is to use Google Alert. Just register, choose good keywords and Google will send you a daily or weekly update with relevant content produced about those keywords. It may take some fine-tuning to get your keywords right, but then you’ll have all this great social media content delivered right into your inbox.

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This post is part of the series on Social Media in Youth Ministry. As I wrote in an earlier post on Social Media in Youth Ministry: Blogging, the microblogging platform Tumblr is growing rapidly. Interesting, its biggest growth is amongst young people: At this point, 20.3% of the Tumblr users are in the 12-17 group and 29.3% are in the 18-24 group.

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This post is part of the Series on Social Media in Youth Ministry. If you want people to come to your Facebook page or Tumblr site, you have to offer them something that is of value to them. People won’t just magically show up, just because they’re in your youth ministry and you just launched a page. Sure, they may have a look and ‘like’ it, but will they ever come back and engage in a conversation? For social media to work, to become attractive, you need give your visitors a reason to come back. You need to enrich their lives in a way.

Let’s break this down for the three most likely target groups for when you’re involved in youth ministry:

• Youth
• Parents
• Youth leaders in your youth ministry

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In this series on Social Media in Youth Ministry we’ve been looking at social media in youth ministry in general and we’ve discussed several social media in particular, such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Today we want to give you some advice on making a social media plan for your youth ministry.

Why a social media plan?

Make sure you’ve really worked out an answer to this question. Before jumping on the ‘social media bandwagon’ you’ll need to understand what social media are and how they function. And you’ll need to figure out why you or your youth ministry want to create a social media presence and be purposeful about it. ‘Because everyone else is doing it’ isn’t a good enough reason. Don’t proceed until the ‘why’ is crystal clear to you!

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In this series on Social media in Youth Ministry we have been exploring several social media to see how we can use these to connect with youth and with other youth workers. Today we’ll have a look at LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is called a social networking site nowadays, but it started out more ‘professional’ and business like than that. LinkedIn is a network site where you can complete a professional profile about your education, work experience, skills and much more. Its primary goal is to facilitate networking. You ask people to become part of your network, which is supposed to be based on actually knowing each other. By using the networks of the people in your network, you increase your potential business network. Obviously, it’s also used for job searches and recruitment.

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This post is part of the series on Social Media in Youth Ministry. Now that we have looked at social media in youth ministry in general and have discussed the question whether or not Facebook is still ‘hot’ amongst youth, let’s have a look at some creative ways you can use Facebook in your youth ministry:

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This post is part of our series on Social Media in Youth Ministry, be sure to check out the other posts! After having taken a good look at using Facebook and Twitter in youth ministry, today we’ll see how we could use blogging in youth ministry.

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This is the fourth post in a series on Social Media in Youth Ministry. Be sure to check out the other posts!

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