Sharing the gospel using Facebook

After many years of resisting, I finally joined Facebook. My intention is to find another avenue to share the gospel. I have been blogging for a little over a year and have enjoyed numerous conversations about the gospel with many visitors. But for the most part, I feel like I’m preaching to the choir. It seems that most everyone who reads my blog is a fellow LDS blogger.

My favorite dialogs online have been from those who are former Mormons or those who are on their way out. I don’t know why. Perhaps it is because they raise such interesting questions. Sometimes I have to scratch my head to figure out why a particular doctrine is such a problem for them, but I am encouraged that they are willing to talk about it.
This will not be a long essay because I have no experience with Facebook and am unable to offer any suggestions as to how to share the gospel through this medium. So I’ll turn it around and ask for your advice. Will you visit my Facebook profile and give me some advice? What should I do to make it interesting? What is the best way to initiate dialog about the gospel on Facebook?
Can you direct me to some online resources where others have described their success in sharing the gospel via Facebook? I’ll add the links to this post as I run across good material. I’m especially interested in discovering which is the best online method to reach out to others about our faith – blogging, YouTube (like Seth Adam Smith), Facebook, Twitter, or something else.

7 thoughts on “Sharing the gospel using Facebook”

  1. On Facebook, there are events like “Mormon Status” day (just search those words and the group will come up). You can organize whatever you’d like, too. You could use a scripture as your status (“Tim just read…”), etc. I use it a lot to keep in contact with old school friends who were protective of my Mormonism. They see I haven’t changed much, am very happy, and am still strong in the church. HTH! 🙂

  2. The neat thing for me so far is all the people from work who have added me as friends. That’s always nice when the people you work with are willing to consider you as a friend as well as a co-worker. I work with a great bunch of people. They become almost like family when you see them every day, or in my case, twice a week that I go into the office. I like your suggestion Megan, and I’m going to try it. Thanks.

  3. In The Doghouse

    I am an Institute instructor and member of a YA Branch… I communicate with all my Young Adults via Facebook all the time. It is a great way to share links and communicate with them instantly. I am on Twitter as well, but for me status updates on Facebook work more broadly (not everyone has jumped on board with Twitter yet). We were able to have some incredible discussion regarding Prop 8 in California, and felt united as we worked together to dialog with some of our non-member friends on there. It was a great place to show support for each other.Good luck and have fun on Facebook!

  4. Michaela Stephens

    One way that you can share the gospel on Facebook is by adding an application that feeds your blog posts to your Facebook profile and notifies people on your minifeed when you publish a new post. I have this on my profile. I use Simplaris Blogcast for mine.

  5. Facebook is a wonderful way to widen your circle of influence. I too, felt the need to blog outside of the familiar LDS circle, so I created an account on Hubpages. I have had tremendous opportunities to share the gospel with those, outside of the Church.LdsNana-AskMormon on HubPagesHowever, I really enjoy my blogger blog account, where I do post knowing, that I am read by LDS members. I think we need both of these connections, online. It feels good to communicate and feel supported by our own community – along side of reaching out to others that are not members.tDMgKathryn Skaggs

  6. In the doghouse: I wish I had been on Facebook back when we were debating Proposition 8. I am in the bishopric of a single adult ward and am now Facebook friends with many of our ward members. I can see how it might have made a difference to be better connected thorugh Facebook as we went through that difficult time together. I am realy enjoying Facebook more and more as a way to stay connected with friends that are both close and far away.Michaela Stephens: I’ve added a feed application called Networked Blogs to my Facebook account. So far I’m not too impressed. Maybe I just don’t get it. Thanks for the suggestion of Simplaris Blogcast. I’ll check it out.LDSNana: Wow! I’m impressed with your online presence. You seem very well connected in all kinds of places. I’m beginning to see that each online community has unique readership with little overlap. That’s a good way to reach out to many different kinds of poeple. I think you’re right that we become familiar with and comfortable with our readership in each forum. I’m sticking with Blogger for my mainly LDS readers but will also take a look at what you have done on HubPages. Thanks.

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