Please Don’t Use Social Media

I’d like to make a request: please be quiet. Don’t say anything. Please don’t say anything at all to young adults, and especially don’t try to do it with social media tools. Don’t even think about starting a blog or creating a YouTube channel or signing up for Twitter. Please don’t begin a Facebook group, Flickr page, or launch a podcast. Don’t do any of these. Just be quiet, unless of course, you really have something to say.

Sure, young adults are using social media. According to Forrester Research’s early 2008 data, 90 percent of Americans between 18-24 years old, and 84 percent between 25-34 year olds use social media. Clearly, most young adults are online and using social media technology, but please don’t let these numbers encourage you to begin engaging them in social media unless you actually have something to say.

So how do you know if you have something to say? Start with these:

• If you have truth to share, you have something to say.
• If you have an experience to draw from, you have something to say.
• If you know something I should know, you have something to say.
• If you can tell me about someone I should meet, you have something to say.
• If you have perspective where I am lacking, you have something to say.

The biggest misconception about social media tools is that they fix communication issues. They don’t. They merely extend the reach of what you already have to say. Therefore, if you don’t have anything to say already, you now have the opportunity to be equally ineffective to a larger number of people with the help of social media.

Social media doesn’t consist of magic beans and pixie dust. It doesn’t create something for you that wasn’t there to begin with. If you’re saying nothing today, you will say nothing in even more places with social media. Your silence will be amplified and resound with a great hollowness that would echo for eternity if not for the absence of anything there in the first place.

My advice to anyone interested in reaching young adults with social media is that they immediately forget about social media. First, figure out what you actually have to say. What is the message? What is the content you have to offer that is compelling? To what degree are you willing to engage in conversation openly and candidly with people who may want to talk to you? These are the types of questions that are appropriate to begin with. The wrong questions start with choosing technology. The technology should fit the content, not the other way around.

Content, then, becomes your focus rather than the technology. Content is the basis on which young adults will measure you in social media. Good blogs have good content. Bad blogs have bad content. The content is not good because the blog is good. The blog is good because the content made it so.

With content as the focus, and our collective desire as Christians to reach young adults, we should be reminded that there is always one well to draw from that is always rich in content: the gospel. The funny thing about the gospel is that it fits every young adult. Whether he was saved in middle school and is still learning about God’s love and grace, or she’s an atheist and shows no signs of changing her mind. The gospel says it all. The gospel is the most compelling content ever created. The gospel fuels the best conversations you can ever have.

As you consider social media as a means of reaching young adults, don’t neglect the more important task of focusing young adults on the greatest content ever told. Yes, you can reach far and wide with social media tools. Social media has become a useful and persuasive force. Its wide access and ease of use have created more opportunities for more people than media has ever provided in history. The case is compelling and seemingly irresistible, but if we want to reach young adults with these great tools and we don’t do it with content that has power, then what are we really doing? We might as well just be quiet.