As a Twitter user, you can engage with a broader Christian community and with others in your own local area (and with other interest groups if your church is involved; there are significant Twitter communities sharing news around human trafficking or debt counseling or student mission, for instance). You can eavesdrop on these conversations and be informed, or you can contribute.

When it began, the worldwide web was like a newspaper or a book: there were pages other people had published that you could read if you wanted. You could even publish your own pages, with a bit of effort, but essentially someone wrote stuff for other people to read.

To change the analogy slightly, the original web was like a traditional sermon or a speech: content flowed one way only.

Blogging changed that, particularly with “comment” boxes. We got the question-and-answer session after the speech.

People could leave their own thoughts or queries and could get a reply. But the model was still fairly formal – a presenter who took, and perhaps responded to, questions and comments, but who remained the host of the conversation and the dominant voice within it.

With the advent of social media, the web, or a significant chunk of it, has become a conversation.

On Twitter there is no “host,” no dominant voice; everyone can speak equally, and conversation flows naturally. The web is no longer a sermon; it is after-church coffee.

This shift, from book to conversation, has been described as a move from web 1.0 to web 2.0, borrowing the numbers used to indicate versions of software.

At the heart of web 2.0 is interactivity: the web is now a place to go to meet people and to engage with them, not just a place to go to find information. It is a community, not a library. The web is now all about social media.

I hope that your church has caught up with web 1.0, that you have a website, which is well designed, kept up to date and includes helpful information for potential visitors.

Social media is a new game entirely, however. Your web 1.0 presence – your website – offers you great dangers, and some opportunities. In web 2.0, there are some dangers for the local church, but they come with enormous opportunities.

To spell this out: most people today are going to find your church by its website. (Really; they are.)

As someone has said “a church without a website is like a church without a front door.”

A well-designed and up-to-date website will give potential visitors both a sense of what your church is like and enough information (maps, times and so on) to connect with you should they want to.

Get this wrong, and you’ve slammed the door in the face of most potential visitors and newcomers; get it right, and you’ve at least created the possibility for people to connect with you should they like what they see.

At the moment, by contrast, getting social media wrong is not going to hurt you that much (unless you say something crashingly stupid in public); getting it right could help you significantly.

What does “getting it right” look like? A sustained and valued participation in relevant conversations. You can quickly become known on Twitter, particularly as someone who is helpful, insightful, witty or all three, and therefore as someone who people want to know and to listen to. How about that as a reputation for your church to have?

So what is social media, concretely?

To begin with, there are two platforms that matter: Facebook and Twitter. There are lots of others, but these are the big ones, and so the places to start.

They are different. Facebook is built on reciprocal relationships, has a degree of presumed privacy, and retains a sense of owned spaces.

By contrast, no one owns any space on Twitter. It is almost entirely public, and relationships can be asymmetric.

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