Social Media and Location Neutrality: A Huge Blow to the Local Church
Social media used to be anchored on geography and physical proximity. When these platforms become location-neutral, local churches will be without tools we now take for granted.
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This is the second of four posts adding some additional commentary to my recent piece on ERLC.com, “4 social media shifts the church should know about”. Each of the four shifts could be an entire article by themselves, and this week, I will be focusing on the second shift in that article, “A shift from geography-driven to geographically neutral”. Like last week, I will be opening up a thread in Substack Chat for further discussion, and the co-author of this piece, Ian Harber, will be joining as well!
Of all the four shifts, this shift has proven the hardest for me to explain - and the hardest for people to latch on to. While video has always been a part of social media, the idea of social media not being driven by location and proximity goes against the grain of everything we’ve lived and breathed since Facebook first took off. And yet, for churches, this shift (and the one we will look at next week) are the two that impact churches the hardest and most severely. To illustrate this, I’m going to reach back into the social media Time Machine to the era when every church had a Twitter account - and why every single one of them failed.
Why Did Twitter Not Work For Churches?
I plan on sunsetting my church’s Twitter account here in a couple weeks. By “sunsetting”, I do not mean deleting the account outright - instead, I will likely make one final thread pointing users to all the other places we are active or where you can find more information about us, namely YouTube and Instagram. Afterwards, we will just not update our Twitter anymore - and nobody will notice or care.
I have joked with my leadership for years now that I could delete our church’s Twitter account and it would be months before anyone noticed. For almost as long as I’ve been our social media manager, our institutional Twitter account has been a boilerplate platform, meaning that everything we published on it was derivative content created for other platforms. On the handful of instances where we tried making Twitter exclusive content, it bombed, and rightly so. Nobody on Twitter ought to care about what is going on at a mid-sized church in the middle of the Bible Belt, and the same was (and is) true for the vast majority of small-to-mid sized churches across the country.
Why? Simple: Twitter, from the very beginning, has been a geographically-neutral platform, and now all social media is moving that direction as well.
In the late 00s, when Facebook and Twitter were beginning to take off, Twitter filled a unique gap that Facebook or MySpace left wide open. The first iteration of Facebook (and we could include platforms like FourSquare as well) were driven more by networking than by media. Like all networking platforms, you start by connecting to those you immediately know (often your friends, family, coworkers, classmates, etc) and working outward from there. Your networking also included connections to your local institutes - your favorite restaurants, shops, local schools or churches, or other institutions that helped facilitate your local milieu.
But Twitter was different. Twitter bypassed geography and put interests and audience at the forefront. You could follow all your local friends on Twitter if you wanted, but since you already were friends on Facebook (and you could write things longer than 140 characters), it was just redundant. What was not redundant was that you could follow your favorite artists, movie stars, authors, and more on Twitter in a way that you couldn’t on Facebook. Not only were your favorite pop stars unlikely to accept your friend request, their public Page was likely controlled by their PR firm. Not their Twitter account, though - that was your favorite star’s personal account. When you followed them, you gained the illusion ability to talk directly to them, and because their Tweets showed up in your feed, they gained the illusion1 that they could talk to you too.
When churches began realizing that they needed presences on Facebook, they picked up a presence on Twitter as well. The difference, however, is that your institutional Facebook presence had a geographic center of gravity; there was a natural pull towards people who lived in your area and their personal social connections. Twitter was the opposite. Twitter was driven by interests, not geography, meaning that unless your church was large/significant enough to generate an interest outside your geographic location, nobody outside your immediate context had any reason to pay attention to you.
My church created its Twitter account in late 2011, and quickly amassed a small following that outpaced its Sunday attendance at the time. It has stayed at that same audience of +/-620 followers for almost a decade, despite an active multimedia social media strategy for more than six years. When I sunset our Twitter, it will not be a big deal, as our Facebook and Instagram presence ended up doing more than enough for us.
What is a big deal is that the same geographic/location-neutral approach that caused our Twitter to be useless is about to do the same to our Facebook and Instagram presence too.
The Era of Interest-Driven Algorithms
When Facebook rolled out the Newsfeed in 2013, the era of social networking ended and the era of social media truly began. While the geographic-driven underpinnings of Facebook were still foundational to the platform and how people used it, the door was now open for users to consume media that interested them outside their immediate context. As Facebook Pages and Groups began to explode and take off, so did the platform. Facebook had the best of both worlds: a strong geographic-focused backbone with the ability to transcend geography if/when users wanted to. It wasn’t able to do everything that Twitter could do (namely the asynchronous relationships between famous people and their fans), but it did just enough to steal much of Twitter’s thunder for several years.
And yet, soon people realized that maybe keeping up with friends and family on Facebook or Instagram isn’t all that great. With a contentious election in 2016, a pandemic in 2020, and four years of rapidly increasing polarization2 in between, many people (myself included) began shying away from paying attention to their friends and family on social media in order to preserve their relational health with them.
The problem, though, is that most social media algorithms were still driven by user’s friends and page follows, most of which were heavily populated back when local connections ruled the day. The advantage of Facebook early on was that its center of gravity was proximity; the struggle of Facebook over the past few years is that its center of gravity remains proximity. Curtailing your feeds to be location neutral was doable, but not easy, resulting in an unpleasant mishmash of posts from pages and friends that you haven’t muted or blocked yet.
What did that leave people with? Their interests. And right as location-driven social media began to freefall, a new form of social media driven by interests would arise, fueled by TikTok’s unrivaled and unmatched content discovery algorithm3.
I’ve said this elsewhere, but it is very difficult to overstate just how powerful - and how good - the TikTok algorithm is. It is, without question, the single greatest social media algorithm of all time to date, and it isn’t even close. It is now the center of gravity for the entire social media landscape, and both Meta and Google are desperately attempting to catch up. There are many factors behind TikTok’s meteoric rise, but perhaps the most important of all is that TikTok perfected interest-based social media - one free from any geographic constraint.
If Meta continues to shift Facebook and Instagram to being TikTok clones (as they have openly signaled and as I had predicted earlier this year), this creates a huge problem for local churches. It is no secret that institutional church social media has been on a decline for several years now, and that unless you’re pumping money into your posts, your reach and engagements are likely a fraction of what they used to be. However, if Meta does successfully create a TikTok clone with either of their main platforms, whatever residual benefits of the “old days” of geography-driven Facebook and Instagram are gone. People may be interested in Christianity, or commentary on churches, but they will not use social media to connect to - much less care about - your local church specifically.
Learning to Breathe New Air
For most small-to-mid sized churches, the free organic reach of our social media pages to people in our immediate area was an invaluable gift. No other form of public communication was a quick, easy, and effective. And yet, the twilight of those days will soon turn into dusk, and churches must begin revamping their communication strategies to communicate effectively with their members (and the general public). This shift lands a huge blow to our ability to communicate internally and externally to those we care about.
What can churches do in response to these shifts? In the ERLC article, Ian and I strongly recommended revising and revamping your church’s email communications strategy. While email marketing (read: communications) is facing plenty of challenges on its own, the fact remains that you own your email list - you do not own any of your follower lists on any social media platform.
I want to add three other semi-related recommendations as well. One of them is a freebie, and the other two are related to our recommendations to boost your email strategy
One: If you’re still running your Facebook and Instagram (and even Twitter!) accounts like you’ve been for the past several years, you can scale back.
This is the freebie. Few things pain me more than seeing local churches continue to run a social media strategy that was likely outdated by 2015 or 2016 at best. If you’ve continued to run your social media “like we always have”, I have good news for you: you can let go. It almost certainly isn’t doing anything for you, and likely hasn’t for some time. You can scale back the amount of time you spend working on content for these platforms and I guarantee you that you likely will not even notice a difference.
(The exceptions to this are churches large enough to get some residual benefit from the scale of their congregation size/page audiences, but that’s not the case for the majority of churches.)
Two: Map Out Your Communication Channels In Your Church
When is the last time you did a communications audit of your church? Do you know what your communication channels are and the people that they reach? Are there any gaps in your communications infrastructure that a tool or service could help fill?
Now, I am not an expert here in this area, but one rule of thumb that has been helpful for me in my church is that the right message needs to get to the right people in the right context. For my church, we’ve identified that our most important communication channel by a landslide are our Gospel Community small groups - nearly every message we need to put out is aimed at the people who attend our groups and is often “heard” better in the context of someone’s home and from their group leader. This isn’t to say that we don’t do announcements on Sunday services, emails, or signage throughout the church - of course we do! But, without a clear map of your communication channels, you may be shooting in the dark more than you realize.
Three: Communicate About Where You Communicate
This one is more intangible, but perhaps the most important of the three. Churches have a responsibility to communicate effectively with their people, but their people also have a responsibility to be listening, and if they don’t know where to listen, it shouldn’t be a surprise if a message doesn’t get heard.
If your church communicates heavily by email, don’t just assume that your people know that. Make sure you audible say often “the most important place to stay up-to-date with us is by checking your email”, or “we publish all our important events, calendar, and updates on our website”. Don’t just assume that your people are aware of the basket that you’re putting most of your eggs in - make it explicit and clear, and do so often. This is not just a good practice for existing members, but for new members too.
Of course, all these suggestions impact internal church communication; most of these recommendations have little benefit for external church communications. Unfortunately, the news gets even worse from here when it comes to public communication. The shift to location-neutrality is the first big blow to the local church - the second big blow to the local church, a shift from institutional-driven social media to influence-driven social media, is equally devastating, and I will explain why in next week’s post.
Substack Chat for This Week: Your Favorite Non-Local Social Media Discoveries
I’ve really come to appreciate Substack Chat as an alternative to Twitter. It is a much more chill and direct way to engage with the writers I read, and I want to invest in this feature (and new social media platform?) as much as I can. Substack Chat is only available on the mobile app, so if you’re reading on email or desktop, consider downloading the app!
Here is my question based on this week’s post: what is something beneficial that you’ve discovered on social media that is outside your immediate context? This can be a person, a publication, a hobby - anything! It is easy to speak negatively of social media, but are there any ways that location-neutral social media has made your life better?
Thanks for reading Passing Through Digital Babylon. Next week I will be writing on the third shift of our ERLC piece, and what it means for the future of church communication as churches - and the potential for well discipled personal influencers to stand in the gap. If you enjoyed this piece, please consider sharing it on your socials or texting it to a friend who might enjoy it too!
Together, we are passing through Digital Babylon,
Austin.
This may sound harsher than I intend it to be; I personally have been able to converse with many of my heroes on Twitter over the years. What I want to emphasize here is that the possibility of being able to talk to people on Twitter that you would never be able to talk to on Facebook or other platforms was one of the biggest selling points of Twitter, and more often than not, it was a mirage.
Technically, false polarization, but it’s just easier to say ‘polarization’ here even though studies consistently show that the American public has not become more polarized than it appears they have.
I don’t think that is the technical name of TikTok’s algorithm, but the term “discovery engine” has been used to describe what Meta hopes to clone for itself with FB/IG, and what YouTube is working to emulate with its Shorts.