Case Study: Mars Hill Church's Social Networking Strategy

Mars Hill Church makes good use of social networking tools on Myspace and Facebook.  They're not your typical church - they're huge (6000 in weekly church attendance), they have a celebrity pastor, and their congregation is heavily young and tech-savvy.  So its natural for them to have a big presence on these sites... let's see what they're up to

Pastor Mark Driscoll's Facebook profile has 4000 friends.  Less than 20% of these friends are from the Seattle area.  Besides listing his basic profile info, he has apps to read in his blog, link to his books from Amazon, play videos from their Ask Anything sermon series, and read in Mars Hill RSS feeds.  Dustin tells me he gets 20 messages and wall posts a day.

One thing to notice here is that all of his videos are less than 10 minutes long.  No half hour sermons here.  Light comments and discussion around the videos (example)

Mark Driscoll's Myspace profile has 400 friends.  Not as much activity, but another channel to reach him.  Dustin says they may use Myspace more when OpenSocial opens up Myspace to more robust applications.

The Mars Hill group on Facebook and their group on Myspace each have 1700 members, or just under 30% of their congregation.  Its a relatively small % given the fact that Mars Hill pastors mention Myspace and Facebook on Sundays, and encourage their members to join the groups. 

Both groups have forums with light, sporadic discussion.  Their experience with groups seems to mirror that of Phil's - some initial excitement and conversation, but little activity in the long run.  Seems like the 10% rule of participation makes message boards a poor fit for churches if they're looking to generate consistent engagement.

However the Facebook group is good for broadcasting messages to all members.  Mars Hill doesn't really do this, but North Park Community Church does so every couple weeks with its group of 220 members.  And the groups also serve as a common meeting place for church members to find and connect to others who are on Myspace or Facebook.  The Facebook group is also nice because they can add media (photos, videos) and post links.

The Mars Hill Facebook page is similar to a group, with the added benefit of adding 3rd party applications to the page.  They use many of the same apps on Mark's profile page to display content like feeds, videos, and links. 

Finally, Dustin told me about an internal project they're working on - "Our IT department is currently developing our own social network, the City, that will be used for almost all communication within the church."  More info on their soon-to-launch social network here.

Thanks to Dustin for providing detailed answers to my questions on Mars Hill's initiatives in social networking.  And thanks for your innovation and example, Mars Hill Church!

- Joe Suh
(if other churches want to share what they're doing in social networking, please drop a comment here)

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