In my new youth ministry position I’m finding that I can know more about my students simply by using Facebook.

Matter of fact, I’m now using Facebook to connect with adults and students in my youth ministry and it works very well. Here’s some tips on how to integrate Facebook into your youth ministry:

• First things first – you need to get a FB account. If you don’t have one you are really missing out on the online social interaction between you and your youth and of course your friends.
• Search for your students – you may be surprised that you find quite a few already on there. Do your best to add them as friends – more than likely they won’t reject your request unless they hate you or something. Don’t expect them to find and add you – you go after them!
• Create a FB Group for your youth group – It’s not hard to do, click on the groups icon and then create a new group and make sure that you name it the same as your youth’s name or whatever you normally call your group. Along with this make sure that you now go through your list of students as friends and invite them to join the group.
• Promote your group – Mention it in your youth meetings, encourage parents to join or start a parent FB group.
• Keep it updated – Nothing sucks more then when a group page has outdated info or it seems that it hasn’t been used in awhile. I update mine now about 3 – 4 times a week if possible. But minimally you need to do it at least once a week or don’t start it.
• Encourage Participation – You can have students upload their own pics of an event that you did. You can play games having them guess the correct answer to a question or riddle or picture.
• Go Mobile – Encourage students to set up their cell phones and subscribe to your SMS status updates so that they can know what you are up to and you can subscribe to theirs too. Just look up how to do Facebook Mobile and get your phone set up and teach them to do the same.

If you have other tips or ideas for using Facebook in your youth ministry please leave them as a comment for others to see.

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