top church pages on Facebook in 2011

Who are the churches that are good examples of using Facebook and social media well?

Before we dive in, there are different metrics for success and there are different ways of using social media, so it would seem to me to be unfair to make a list with scores or rankings. In other words, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all of how a church should use social media or Facebook.

Social media / Facebook can be used for much more than marketing and broadcasting. Social media gives voice to every person. Social media can give an inside look at the life of a church. The voice of the people, who are the church, can be seen and heard by anyone online, and that can be a far more powerful witness than an organizational one.

Here’s a pseudo-random sampling of churches with big numbers of people who like their Facebook Pages ::

Tech notes: The numbers were retrieved around the time of this writing. Ministries are excluded. These churches were found via allfacebook.com leaderboard and Facebook Search and Advanced Search app. These churches were manually found by hand aka “brute-force” so they’re not computationally accurate for a leaderboard. Many of these church’s Facebook pages were actually hard to find. You’d think with the millions on Facebook that there’d be a smarter search engine.

Aside: While these churches are amassing large numbers of likes on their Facebook pages, this might be more of an indicator of church size or mass-appeal popularity, and not necessarily how much social media engagement is happening within that church community nor how much platform & exposure is given to the voices in its church community.

Aside #2: somewhat related: there’s the Church of Facebook book + churches featured for being on Facebook + a list of online churches with internet campuses + a recent Lifeway Research study stating 47% of churches actively use Facebook