Family Focus Friday: Game it Up with Social Media

Aside from communicating with the congregation, social media games can be created to teach and involve members. There are many different church wide activities that a church could host through social media.

Game Examples Include:

1) Scavenger hunts for the congregation to play on social media sites.

• Twitter: Church members hosting the game could plant things around the city (or on the web) then get other members to look for the clues/items by dropping hints on the church Twitter account. An example of the game in action can be seen by following @scavengerhunt on Twitter.
• Scvngr: is an even better social media site for conducting scavenger hunts socially online. To see how it works, check out this video:

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/15175607[/vimeo]

To learn how to build scavenger hunts in Scvngr check out this video!

2) Games or competitions that revolve around holidays. For example, the 4th of July is coming up. One competition could revolve around who can have the funnest Independence Day photo. Facebook would be the best social media site to host this competition. On your existing page you could create an event page where members can post their best pictures to enter the competition. By using your existing page, you can get more fans to stick around after the competition. This is better than creating a temporary fan page because it brings more exposure to your existing Facebook site. Likewise, the event page connected to your existing fan page is a great way to keep everything together. This keeps it all together while avoiding a bunch of dead pages of competitions past. On the event page, the admin can make a poll with vizu’s web poll widget to put on the page so church members could log on to their Facebook and vote on their favorites. See how to put a poll on Facebook by going to this site.

3) Children can be encouraged to learn bible verses in a new way by using Twitter to talk to them. Similar to the scavenger hunt, Church members could post verses to Twitter and ask kids to reference the verse.

For example, a Twitter post could be: “What is the reference to this verse “For God loved the world so much that he gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life?”

Then, a contest can be held to see who can answer the most scripture references in one week. This would be a fun way for kids to learn scripture, get involved, and ask their parents about verses.