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If you haven’t noticed, social networking on the web is big, huge in fact. How does a church web-site get involved?

I don’t think that a medium sized church, like TAC has the critical mass to have a social network based around it’s church web-site (sort of discussed previously).

For a medium-sized church, discussion forums don’t work, a ‘church blog’ might work (not just a news feeds like the blog on the TAC site), comments on sermons don’t work. I not sure about discussion email lists, ours once was quite active, now traffic consists of the occasional announcement (I think it might have gotten too big).

For a while, individual members got into blogging, but that slowed.

So, you might conclude that the members of our church are not active on the web. Yet, jump onto the social networking mega-site Facebook and you’ll find a whole pile of people from our church.

This is a turning point for me in the understanding of the operation of a church web-site. For the time being at least, the church web-site doesn’t need to focus on being a social network. But the church web-site does need to be social network aware. That is, making it simple for members to take the content from the church and share it on whatever web-based social network they’re using.

So, over the weekend, I added links to “Post this to: Facebook · del.icio.us” on the Bible talk pages of the TAC site. (here’s an example) Looks simple enough, but I’ve added some meta data “under the hood” which enhances the “sharing”. Facebook can grab from the page being shared not just the title and URL, but also a description, author’s name, an image and audio file. (If you want to share stuff on your site with Facebook, read about making the Share Preview work)

Here’s what that talked I linked to above will look like when shared on Facebook:

So in this case, Raj has posted it on his profile. It does say “posted a music file” but there’s no way to change that. And, yes, that play button does work – right there on Facebook.

That’s where I think church web-sites now need to evolve, ensuring that their content is shareable. Unfortunately sharing to Facebook requires extra code on our end that other sites won’t be able to use, but I suspect that most churches will only need to share to a small number of these social network sites.