Is Social Media Making Church Websites Less Important?

Mashable raises this question for corporate websites, citing Vitamin Water's campaign to direct their ad viewers to their Facebook fan page instead of their main website.

It's an interesting strategy - Mashable argues that Vitamin Water's corporate website is glossy and graphically impressive.  But has no compelling reason for anyone to come back.  But their Facebook page lets users interact with the brand.  More importantly, interactions get published back to your Facebook stream, so your friends can see it.

Will we see this same type of shift in church websites?  Facebook and Twitter may be much more important to your church than Google.  Will follow-up on this with a related post in 2 weeks...

- Joe Suh from MyChurch

Comments

[Phil]

Interesting, I'd be interested in how Vitamin Water are resourcing a Facebook page. Social Media can quickly stop being social and start being advertising.

[Darien]

This seems like a no brainer to me. The younger generation has often ignored church websites. Why go? They can get announcements of upcoming events in other places. They want to interact. Facebook+ gives them that. Makes perfect sense to me.

And I've always wondered why kelloggs wanted me to go to their website anyway...

[Nikomas]

Our student ministry has re-thought our website and made made strictly social media based. www.HSMweb.com

[Chris Wyatt]

Interesting, I don't know how well it works for every corporate strategy, but I can certainly understand the need to reach a larger audience through different channels.

As far as for churches, well, each church will have to assess their need on using different tools and using it effectively for their ministry.

I do think to reach a younger audience, it does help to use the tools that the audience is actively using. Facebook is one of those tools as is twitter. But it's important to understand who you are trying to reach and then pursue that avenue.

[Jenn Randolph]

The only thing I would worry about with Facebook are the ads. It's not necessarily a "safe" environment. Where as, tangle.com is. They monitor everything before it goes live on their site. I have a son, and I would not want to let him lose on a Facebook account. I'd just feel much safer having him go through a clean site like Tangle.