How To Show Love On Social Media

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Deception, pseudonyms, trolling, employing tricks to increase followerships – all of these strategies have gradually seeped into our lifestyles and gained grounds in this era of tech and social media.

If you missed our previous post on how social media have complicated our lives and relationships, hence, making it impossible to identify true and genuine love, read this .

Using social media tools to spread the gospel creatively, like what the Christian Blog Ghana has been actively doing in the past seven months, have revealed the competitive nature, indifference of followers and the various tactics or tricks used in this world of social media. These attitudes, sometimes, kill the spirit of a brand and this post aims to suggest some of the ways that we can show love and encouragement to each other on social media:

Let’s focus on the Overall Goal
This suggestion goes to individuals and brands which share similar aims and goals – let’s focus on the overall goal. The Christian Blog Ghana. for example, aims at using creative means to propagate the gospel, therefore, when it finds brands in the same niche, it does not hesitate to share, like and follow them. However, that is not the case with all brands, for instance on Instagram, individuals and brands swarm onto a page when there is some new content. They follow, like your post and page and, astronomically increase your number of followers within a few minutes and in a matter of seconds, the number of followers reduces drastically.

What is this tactic called, if it cannot be equated to a trick? It is even more shocking to find brands in your niche (Christian, in our case) in this activity of ‘following and unfollowing.’ Why is the focus on using this means to make people believe we are following them while we unfollow them surreptitiously or when they are not looking? Why are we competing for numbers? Don’t we share the same goal of spreading the gospel (Matthew 28:19)? Are we not supposed to encourage each other and hold each other’s hand to do that? Will it be about the number of followers we had on our social media pages when Jesus Christ comes for the second time?

Let’s Show some Kindness by Reading and Liking Content

It is quite challenging to promote Christian content on social media. For whatever reason, it is very difficult to get friends, family, and followers to like, comment and share your posts. This is not to say we thrive on your commendation but it shows us we do not have dormant pages. It gives us the ability to interact with you and it helps us understand how the Spirit is influencing you through us. Please interact with us, We would love to know if you are being blessed by our content or not. If there are changes you wish to see on our pages, do share them with us. Love is kind (1 Corinthians 13:4) – remember?

Let’s Support One Another
Let’s help each other to achieve our various goals. There may be individuals and brands who may not necessarily be in our niche but are using their platforms to push worthy causes – let’s give them the little push.

On WordPress, let’s follow other blogs, let’s read, like and comment on each other’s posts. On Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter – let’s support one another by liking, remaining loyal followers and commenting on each others’ posts. Let’s avoid seeing each other as competitors but rather one big community promoting different causes.

In this era of sophisticated technological and social media tools like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the rest, where the world has been reduced in size and space, how can we understand the meaning of true love?

When we do not spend quality time to know each other but with the click of the button on any smart device, find the details of someone’s life – their thoughts, their likes, dislikes…

When we are made to feel so special because a million and one friends are reminded it’s our birthday, hence, the need to wish us…

When we sometimes do not feel the urge to wish someone a happy birthday but are afraid when it gets to our turn, they’d also not send us wishes…

When we intentionally post certain content for those group of ‘friends’ to see…

When we tip vendors to post our wedding photos and ensure they go viral for our ‘friends’ to see…

When there is no clear difference between our personal lives and what we post online…

When we have specialised in ‘branding’ ourselves so well that when others get onto our social media pages, they feel their lives are too boring and must do something about it…

When we are forced to look and act in a certain way every time because that is what attracted our followers to us…

When we sometimes check out the pages of our friends and former colleagues and they make us wonder which route of life we took…

When our lives have even been reduced much further through the creation of ‘closed’ groups where we seem to find solace in the arms of people we hardly know…

When we see people in trouble but are concerned about getting their information online than helping them…

When we allow the photos of dead bodies and the manner in which people lost their lives to go viral but, when it comes to a church programme, the last stop for that poster will be our devices…

When we do not care so much about verifying details and the consequences they might have on victims, so far as, we are the first to report that juicy piece of information…

When we do not really care about the emotions of other people but say it anyway, because it will attract a lot of comments and reactions from our friends and followers…

When we ask people to say ‘Amen’ and share posts by putting fear in them…

When some of us are shy to declare our faith publicly because of what our friends and followers would say or do?

In this era of social media, it’s really hard to tell who is that genuine friend or brother or sister. The next time we decide to post on social media, remember this: