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Once you have a sense of how best to be authentically present in social media spaces generally, it’s important to nuance that presence for a specific social media locale. The idea here is to focus on the features of a particular platform that can best help you to tell your story and that of your faith community. In Click 2 Save, we highlight what we see as the major social media platforms based on numbers of active participants, our best guess at durability in the rapidly changing digital landscape, and compatibility with traditional and emerging mainline ministry practice. The platforms we discuss in Chapter 3 include:

 Facebook—www.facebook.com

 Twitter—www.twitter.com

 LinkedIn—www.linkedin.com

 Blogs—e.g., www.wordpress.com; www.blogger.com; www.posterous.com; www.tumblr.com

 YouTube—www.youtube.com

 Foursquare—www.foursquare.com

This chapter will help you to decide which combination of social media platforms will be most effective for you by providing a range of criteria for decision making, such as congregational style and strengths, intended conversation partners (i.e., age groups, location, members, potential members), congregational goals, level of skill, and available time.

One way to think about your approach to various platforms is to consider how you present yourself, your ministry, and your faith community in different local settings. If you’re a spiritual director, for instance, you’re unlikely to dole out morsels of spiritual wisdom online at the local coffee house. But you probably are inclined to express a general attentiveness to those you encounter—perhaps a certain warmth toward the latte-slinger behind the counter—that reflects something true about your spiritual values. This is much the sort of presence you’ll want to cultivate on platforms like Twitter, while in spaces that allow for more extended exchange, like Facebook or, more still, blogs, you’ll tell the story of your faith, your ministry, and your community somewhat differently. Chapter 3 will acquaint you with each of the major platforms, highlighting those features that will best open your story to others and introducing tools and tips to help as you continue to develop your social media strategy.

Please note: Our approach to these platforms is through the lens of digital ministry practice. So, our exploration of social media platforms in Chapter 3 is meant to serve as a guide to ministry, not a manual on the technical features of each platform per se. While our discussions of various platforms will refer to key features and characteristics, and we will provide some basic definitions, we assume that readers have visited the social networking sites we discuss, and that they have a basic familiarity with how they work. If you have not done so already, it will be helpful as we move ahead together if you have set up basic Facebook and Twitter profiles. You can add accounts for other platforms as they make sense within your digital ministry strategy.