Thank you so much for your continued support of the work I am doing and for your constant prayers on my behalf.
Those of you who follow my work know that I try to employ every possible means of communicating the gospel. The “social media” are one such means, and this month I want to explain something I do with Facebook that I believe is reaching many people with biblical teaching.
I operate a WordPoints Facebook page (unrelated to my personal Facebook page) that is tied closely to my website. The URL for this WordPoints page on Facebook is https://www.facebook.com/wordpoints.daybooks/
Every day of the week, I post to this Facebook page each of the daily readings from my books (Diligently Seeking God, Reaching Forward, and Enthusiastic Ideas). In addition, the Daily Family Bible Studies for the next week are posted each Saturday. All of these readings then show up in the Facebook newsfeed of each person who has “liked” the WordPoints page. As of today, the WordPoints page has 6,249 “likes” and this number is growing steadily. I anticipate reaching 10,000 “likes” within another year or two.
The daily pages from the books can, of course, be obtained in many other ways: hard copies of the books, the wordpoints.com website, free daily emails that can be subscribed to, a free WordPoints mobile app that people can install on their phones and tablets, etc. But the data suggest that more people read the posts each day as a result of the WordPoints Facebook page than any of the other formats in which they are available. Often the numbers are simply amazing.
In their personal newsfeed, when people interact with (by liking, sharing or commenting on) any of the individual readings, Facebook then boosts that post to friends of those who have interacted with it, increasing exponentially the number of people the readings are served to. Sometimes the “reach” of a single post can be in the range of 1,000–2,000 readers. Last week, the total “reach” for all posts for the week was 3,815 readers.
Many of these readers end up going to my website where they not only read the post that Facebook served them, but they click through to other resources and read additional teaching materials that are on the website.
As you can see, thousands of individuals read at least one of these articles each day as a result of this Facebook page dedicated to WordPoints. (And this is not counting those who read the articles through other media.) Facebook allows me to leverage content that has already been written, and expose many people to it who wouldn’t see it anywhere else. Simply put: Facebook takes work that I have already done and creates a whole new audience for it.
It takes a certain amount of my time to do this, seven days a week, and I spend about $100 a month (out of pocket) on Facebook advertising to attract new followers to the WordPoints page. But this method is reaching thousands of readers. I am thankful that this medium allows me to put free biblical teaching material in the hands of a such a vast audience. Our work in the gospel is sowing as much seed as possible, and that is what I am trying to do by every means available, as long as I have the strength and resources to do it. I thank God daily for your support.
Gary Henry — WordPoints.com + AreYouaChristian.com
