EDIT: To see the most recent version of the data that I’ve been collecting (and reference in this post), please click here.
For around a year and a half now, I’ve been collecting social media statistics on United Methodist conferences to see the sort of outreach and growth that conferences were experiencing on social media platforms, one of the fastest growing methods of communication. Today, I’d like to briefly look back on the data for 2017.
If you’re reading this, you’re most likely coming from one of the UMTracker accounts that have been incredibly quiet lately, and that’s honestly just because of school. I haven’t had the time to write like I had wanted to, plus college just got incredibly busy for me. However! I do have some updates that I can share about UMTOOS and UMTracker, as well as my personal endeavors related to the United Methodist Church:
If you’ve made it to this far, I do appreciate you taking the time to read all of this! As always, please feel free to contact me if you have questions or comments.
Until next time,
Jacob
As some of you may have noticed, I did not post anything last week, and this week’s post won’t be too terribly long. However, what I do have to share this week is my second set of social media data, which will now be publicly available starting today! Not only that, but this data focuses on a different yet very important (in my opinion) group within the United Methodist Church: the youth demographic.
The “United Methodist Church in the US – Social Media Presence (Youth)” spreadsheet is structured in the same way that my Annual Conference spreadsheet is, with conference youth accounts listed for all three major social networks. Each social network has two sheets, one based on the number of likes/followers for the account and one based on membership in the church (the latter being based on line 16 “CF YOUTH”, or an equivalent line, in every conference’s 2015 statistics). With this particular set of data, I’m hoping to draw more conclusions on how the church is communicating with youth and connecting them to youth-centric events and conference/youth campaigns in the future.
If you are interested in taking a look at this data, it can be found here. Please let me know if you have any comments or questions about it by leaving a comment below!
Until next time,
Jacob
Emoji: once a Japan-exclusive addition to text messaging, emoji have now become a universal method of communication that people from all generations have picked up on. These little pictures are now standard on smartphones, and they’ve even made their way onto desktops and laptops. Not only that, they’ve also become an easy way to shorthand a message without losing the original meaning (or in some cases, giving it meaning words alone couldn’t accomplish)!
So why don’t annual conferences and churches use them more often?
Continue reading Emoji Are 👌 For Communicating (Just Don’t Overdo It!)
Hello, everyone! As you may have seen, the posts have lightened up a little bit recently, due to my return to Hendrix for the Spring 2017 semester. However, I’m not letting that stop me from writing on here, and in fact, I’ve got a few updates!
And that’s all I’ve got for now! As always, I share my thoughts and research in the hopes that this ends up being of some benefit to someone, and I appreciate any comments or questions. Please feel free to contact me at me@jacobturner.me, or leave a comment below! I always love hearing your thoughts or what your conference is doing.
Until next time,
Jacob
As I previously mentioned in my “Does Your Conference (Or Church, For That Matter) Really Need A Mobile App?” post, I am a firm proponent of “responsive” web design. However, while I did highlight some excellent examples of some websites that look great on mobile devices from the Minnesota, New Mexico, and Pacific Northwest Conferences, I didn’t really go into my thoughts on what constitutes a good conference website. Now, “good” can be defined in a number of ways, so I decided to build a front page based on the following points:
In developing the “The United Methodist Church in the US – Social Media Presence” spreadsheet, one of the first things I had to do was find each annual conference’s social media account on either Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. However, this actually proved to be a bit of a time-consuming process (two hours, according to Google Sheets) because of the differences in social media account names and usernames across networks. So, I wanted to give a few tips and tricks on identifying your conference (or any organization, including churches) easily enough to where anyone can find you with a few quick keystrokes.
Continue reading Best Practices for Social Media Account Identification
I just wanted to write a quick post for the new year reflecting back on the blog (for the few days that it has existed) and the social media statistics data that I’ve been collecting for close to six months now.
They seem to be all the rage nowadays: the mobile app. Mobiles apps exist for any and every company, service, or product you can imagine, from Netflix to the NCAA, Walmart to the Washington Post, and Bandsintown to the Bible itself. The iPhone even popularized the phrase “there’s an app for that,” which has become an answer to any question you can imagine. Need directions? “There’s an app for that.” Want to order something from *insert store here*? “There’s an app for that.”
In keeping with that trend, annual conferences and churches have jumped aboard the mobile app train, releasing their own (often in conjunction with outside developers). By my personal (and very quick) count, close to a third (18 of 55) of all annual conferences have at least one app of some sort, and countless churches on top of that. However, I want to ask two questions about these church and conference apps that are the most important: what is the app accomplishing, and is it worth it? The short answers (in my opinion) are “nothing unique” and “no”, but let’s really look at these closely.
Continue reading Does Your Conference (Or Church, For That Matter) Really Need A Mobile App?
For those of you who have read my “Interning With The ARUMC” blog/category (click here if you haven’t, it’s a really good read, or so I’ve been told), you know that this summer was a very influential one for me: I had the opportunity to discover how I could use my passion for technology in a way that both served God and served the world. However, it went much deeper than that for me, which is why I write for you all today.
