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before then to spread their message, and that is essentially what
technology is allowing pastors and
churches to do now,” said Todd
Rhoades, the director of new media
and technologies at the Leadership Network, which seeks to help
churches master technical innovation. “But it’s on a much larger
scale and in many ways it’s on a
more individual scale — it seems a
lot more personal.”
Social media brand managers
would pay dearly for fans as active as the followers that religious groups have attracted
online. On social networking
sites, megapastors’ fan bases are
considerably smaller than those
of pop stars or big brands, but
church followers tend to be far
more engaged and apt to spread
the word of their preachers.
Religious groups regularly rank
among the top five most-discussed
fan pages on Facebook, according
to PageData, a social media analytics firm. Rihanna, the most popular
public figure on Facebook with over
70 million “likes,” averaged 41,000
interactions per Facebook post during the month of March, reported
Quintly, an analytics firm that registers shares, comments and “likes”
as individual interactions. Joel
HUFFINGTON
06.09.13
Osteen Ministries, with a relatively
paltry 3.6 million “likes,” averaged 160,000 interactions per post,
Quintly found — nearly four times
Rihanna’s average, three times
Justin Bieber’s and almost sixteen
times the White House’s.
Evangelical Christians and social
media creators ultimately share
something fundamental in common: Both are consumed with the
nature of how information spreads,
and both are intent on fashioning
a sense of community out of individuals separated by time, space,
language and culture. Both also passionately apply themselves to filling
what they view as a void in the human experience.
“Religion is the original social
media,” says Jonah Berger, author
of Contagious: Why Thi