Engage Students Using Facebook

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Video Transcript

Our students are using technology at a faster and faster pace all the time. It surrounds and inundates their life. We need to learn how to use it effectively. To use it for information and connection, and save the spaces where we're with them together, live and in-person for meaning and relationship. One of the ways that we've talked about using is Facebook. Now, most of you probably are on Facebook, some of you might not be, and some of your students are on Facebook.

Sometimes students are on Facebook for different reasons. Sometimes they're on because they're engaging their friends. Sometimes they're on just because they know their grandmother's watching, and they make sure they post pictures of them with their cat, so their grandma feels good about it. Either way, if your students are participating on Facebook, if that's a space that they're inhabiting, I'm encouraging you to join them in that space and figure out ways to communicate information that will help them.

I worked with a group of college students in a class that I taught at a university, and we basically were using a university platform to try and communicate information. What I found was that students just weren't engaging there. The reason that they weren't engaging there was because it was an extra thing. It was an add-on. If you've got a website and you're like, "Hey everybody, go to the website", you're probably not getting as much traffic as you want. The truth is, when I started moving that group over to Facebook, a place that they already participated, I found that they engaged more, because it filled a feed that they were already looking at. They already saw those spaces on a regular basis, so now, I was helping them see in places that they were already participating.

I want you to understand that you should be in those places if you're trying to get information to them. There's a couple of really great ways to do that. The biggest one is Groups. How you use Facebook Groups will impact your group tremendously. For instance, there's a "public group". You can create a public group for your youth group. This is something everyone can see and anybody can join at any particular time. It allows parents to see what's going on, if they're on Facebook as well. Public groups are a phenomenal thing for your students, and for your parents to engage in so that everybody has the same page and it's appearing in feeds that they're already frequenting.

The second Group that you could use is called a "private group". It can be seen on Facebook, but you can't join it easily. You actually have to ask for an invite. You could consider using a private group for your small groups. I know that there are students and leaders that I've talked to that basically use it for their small group, and continue their conversation throughout the week. Maybe they started it when they were all together as a group, and they continued that conversation and kept learning and growing. Or, a student was learning something about the next week's lesson and they started engaging that way.

The one thing I want to caution you on though, is if you're going to use a private group ... Just like you would if you were live ... Just make sure there's at least two adult moderators in the group. You don't want anything inappropriate happening, and you don't even want to give the appearance of anything inappropriate happening.

The last Group, which is a different kind of group, is a "secret group". A secret group is something I might use for parents or I might use for leaders, because you can't see that group on Facebook. You can't ask to join that group on Facebook, because you can't find it. You actually have to be invited into that space by the person running it. That's a great place for leaders to share prayer requests or things that went amazing that night, or just other things that are on their mind or going on in their lives. It's also a great place, if you want to create one just for parents to talk about the things they're struggling with and dealing with. The amazing things that are happening or the difficult things that are happening in their home. All of these different groups allow you to connect in different contexts, both with your students and your leaders and your parents.

I want to encourage you, you're going to have to go where "they" are. Don't expect them to come to you, to your website to read your newsletter or your email. Those all can be effective, but I want to make it very clear. When you're in the spaces that they're already participating in, you are much more likely to have them engage you, understand what's going on, and participate back.

Learn more ways to engage with students with my FREE e-Book 11 Ways to Engage Students Using Technology.

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