Facebook Will Reach 500 Million Users This Week: What Does This Mean?
My first computer was a Macintosh IIc, which my wife and I purchased just before I started my vicarage in 1986. Oh, how I loved that little machine. I taught myself “basic” just enough to wow and amaze myself with my programming prowess, which means, I could hardly do anything. Then I learned how to program in hypertext, and had fun modifying some hypertext desktops for myself. Wow, amazing. In the next year, we purchased a Macintosh SE, and at that point, I started using “e-mail” and got on Genie as our Internet service. There were a few forums. It was all very primitive. Then, when I moved down to St. Louis to serve as an assistant to the president, e-mail became more widely used. But, the majority of all contacts made with the President’s Office were still in the form of paper letters. I had to learn how to use a dictating machine and I had a secretary who helped me assist Dr. Barry with the voluminous amounts of letters we received every week. Dr. Barry made it a point, personally, to read and review and sign every letter/answer we sent. Nothing left the office without his attention. Stacks of letters. Every week. There were e-mails, but they were few compared to the letters.
Fast forward to today.
Now, if I receive two letters, a week, that’s unusual. Junk mail? Sure, loads of it. People using actual physical letters to communicate? Rare, very rare. It’s all e-mail, well, only sort of. Enter Facebook. I would say that 30-35% of contacts I receive are coming through via Facebook, and because anyone can send you a message on Facebook, “friend” or not, anyone using Facebook can send you a message. But there’s something more about Facebook, the contacts are much more personal, conversational, relational. Facebook has revolutionized the nature of communications via the Internet. It is like having a friendly phone chat, much more than any other communication medium has been.
All of which is to say, this week Facebook will hit 500 Million Users. Read that again. 500 million. Again, my respectful encouragement is for pastors to incorporate Facebook into how they communicate and as a way to reach people.
Absolutely. And I didn’t used to think so!
Recently I posted — on Facebook — about the upcoming postage increase that I can remember when a stamp was 3c, but cannot remember the last time I mailed anything.
And for my kids even moreso. They have email, but are much more likely to communicate with someone not in the room by Facebook or text message, not email.
I resisted Facebook for a long time, but now have TWO of them, one for Past Elder and one personal one.
It’s not just a matter of us using it to communicate and to reach people–which we might assume to be a case of us pushing information on them. I find it the best tool for staying in touch with my congregation members. I find out more about what’s happening in their lives–the little things and the big things; I find out their fears, their dislikes–their reactions to sermons, sometimes. It is a real multiplier of my visitation. Sometimes, especially with young adults, I find out more than I wanted to know–not much shame on Facebook. Folks who wouldn’t go to confession will be very “confessional” in their FB revelations.
Bill, this is a very perceptive remark, thanks for it.
Nothing cleans up the conversations among Facebook friends like having their pastor join the network!
I’m curious. Did they say that those 500 Million users all indepenent humans? Are they just accounts or pages? Lots of people have multiple Facebooks, I wonder if that was taken into consideration. I know one guy who has created almost a dozen accounts and fan pages to ficticous individuals or aliases (like past elder did). Mickey Mouse, Gandalf, Darth Vader, Satan, and each of the 7 Dwarves have Facebook pages. Are they part of the 500 Million?
The last numbers I saw had the total number of internet users in the entire world at about 1.8 billion. If that’s still accurate (which it might not be), that would mean that… just over 1/3 of all internet users world wide have Facebook accounts? I dunno…
(None of this detracts from the usefulness and enjoyment that Facebook users obviously get from their pages of course.)
According to comScore, Facebook is the 4th largest website in the internet in terms of traffic (beneath Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! in that order from greatest to least).
Facebook’s reported June traffic was 340 unique visitors (which is not the same as actual human users). That’s still impressive by anyone’s standards.
Correction: 340 Million unique visitors for June.