Most popular Facebook pages of churches and ministries 2012

What are the Facebook pages for churches and ministries with the most likes, aka fans? As we’ve entered the post-billion era of Facebook (the social network that surpassed 1 billion monthly active users on October 4th, 2012),  it’s time to update my previously manually-compiled list of top churches on Facebook back in February 2011. Recently found a handy web service called SocialBakers.com that makes it much easier to find the most liked Facebook pages by category, including one for Church / Religious Organization.

This is the 2012 list of the top 20 churches and ministries on Facebook —

Church / Ministry Facebook Page URL Likes (fans)
Joel Osteen Ministries  http://www.facebook.com/JoelOsteen  2.5m
T.D. Jakes Ministries  http://www.facebook.com/tdjministries  1.2m
TB Joshua Ministries  http://www.facebook.com/pages/TB-Joshua-Ministries/103470916440360  478k
Online Church (of Community Bible Church)  http://www.facebook.com/CBConline  237k
International House of Prayer  http://www.facebook.com/ihopkc  166k
Hillsong Church  http://www.facebook.com/hillsongchurch  137k
John Hagee Ministries  http://www.facebook.com/JohnHageeMinistries  129k
Hillsong Church London  http://www.facebook.com/hillsongchurchlondon  128k
 LifeChurch.TV  http://www.facebook.com/lifechurchtv  104k
 Kenneth Copeland Ministries http://www.facebook.com/CopelandNetwork  86k
 Bethel Church, Redding http://www.facebook.com/bethel.church.redding  81k
 Grace to You (John MacArthur)  http://www.facebook.com/GracetoYou  68k
Mars Hill Church (Seattle)  http://www.facebook.com/marshillchurch  46k
 Saddleback Church  http://www.facebook.com/saddlebackchurch  25k
NewSpring Church http://www.facebook.com/newspring  24k
Calvary Chapel Fort Lauderdale http://www.facebook.com/CalvaryFTL  21k
Crossroads http://www.facebook.com/crdschurch  18k
Church of the Highlands http://www.facebook.com/highlands  17k
New Creation Church, Singapore http://www.facebook.com/nccsg  16k
Christ’s Commission Fellowship http://www.facebook.com/CCFmain  16k

And there are very popular Facebook pages about Christianity and Jesus (with million+ more likes than organized churches and ministries), like Jesus Daily (14.3m likes), Digital Bible (8.5m likes), GodVine (3.0m likes), and ChristiaNet (1.5m likes).

And there are some well-liked denominations and networks of churches on Facebook pages too:

Time to make this participatory, too. What observations do you notice about these Facebook pages? What kind of content and how often are they posting? What are the principles you can infer from how they’re encouraging social engagement (cf. “talking about this”) so people will like, comment, and/or share a page update?


Comments

7 responses to “Most popular Facebook pages of churches and ministries 2012”

  1. Other than the fact that you found a new tool, is there a reason you started including ministries this time? I did like the way you previously kept it to only churches… 🙂 It’s an important metric I think.

  2. Hi Aaron, thanks for the comment. I included ministries and denominations mostly because that’s what came up in the results table. The way Facebook categories work, it puts all of those — churches, ministries, denominations, Christian religious pages, all in the same bucket. I only scrolled thru the top 200 in the Church/religious organization category, you can keep scrolling to find your church, probably on the next page 😉

  3. Please consider The LCMS denomination for your list. 38k+ Likes

    Also: here’s an Interest List with all the big churches on FB

  4. Nice curated list DJ! It’s not easy to separate wheat from chaff from socialbakers or any other automatically-generated lists/tools

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