Last week we covered how to host your own bible study by using social media in Part 1. Now we are going to take an up close look at Bible.org, a social media site that is hosting bible studies for everyone.
Studies: Bible.org has studies available by author, language, series, books, verses, and topics. Each of these studies can be shared on Facebook or Twitter. This can serve as a great place for church groups to get content for studies they want to perform in their own small groups.
Communication: Bible.org’s site includes interactive Forums, member generated Blogs where other users can add comments, and a Users page. The Users page allows for the social media site’s users to form into groups. A lot of the bible studies discussion takes place in these groups.
Communities: bible.org is unique because it has communities that are organized by user. There are communities for pastors, men, women, and children. For example, the women’s ministry section provides leadership resources, bible study curriculum just for women, and discussion forums for women.
Widgets: The Labs section of the website hosts an array of widgets. There is a verse of the day widget for Bloggers, Facebook and MySpace users. Along with daily reading and biblical search tools. Another really cool source from this site is NETBibleTagger. It allows for scripture references in text to pop up when someone scrolls over the text.
Social Media Contest: An interesting campaign Bible.org is using to encourage spreading the word is their social media contest. The contest includes social media sites Facebook and Twitter. Each week Bible.org selects a winner who receives a free NET Bible who does 1 of 4 things:
1) Likes Bible.org on Facebook
2) Follows them on Twitter
3) Re-tweets something they say
4) Says something nice about the new Study environment using the #NETBible hashmark