One of the greatest challenges and and opportunities today for Student Ministry Pastors and Youth Leaders is to connect to new, "un-touched" teens. Downtown "Main Street" is no longer where you can find them. Friday night football games are getting less crowded. Even shopping malls are empty in today's economic times. So where are they all? How do you connect to them?

The answer is the internet. Social networking has replaced almost all methods of communication and socializing in today's youth culture. Take a look at some of these statistics:

There over 150 million users on Facebook, Facebook is used in more than 35 different languages and 170 countries and territories, According to Nielsen, Twitter is the fastest growing community. From Feb '08 to Feb '09, it clocked in at a whopping 1,382% growth rate. In third place is Facebook, with 228% growth YOY

Surprised? If you are not actively spending time building up your social network, the fact is you are loosing opportunities daily at connecting to the vast majority of people that YOU NEED to influence.

Start with the top 2 networks... Twitter is the fastest growing and the largest is Facebook. Get your profile updated with exciting pictures, videos and news from what is going on in your Student Ministry and then update EVERYDAY!

The next key is to build a strong and large network of followers. This starts with you connecting to key colleagues and associates and looking for opportunities. Remember, people = opportunities in our business!

So I'll start... connect to me on Twitter and Facebook and look at my network. Build off of it and start finding people closely associated with your area and demographic then build on that. Then comment on this blog post and post up links to your Twitter, Facebook or any other Social Networking profile and we all will connect to it. This is going to help us all build up our networks and will promise new opportunities in our ministries!



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