Digital Missionary Scavenger Hunt

Gift of Thumbs is working on a list of creative ideas to share the gospel online. Most of these things are one and done! Trying to keep the Sabbath day holy? These are great ways to spend time online on a Sunday. Share this with someone who is preparing to serve a mission!

Do you have other ideas that could be included on this list?  Let us know in the comments!  We might add some!

1. Visit Mormon.org and create a profile. 
You can only create it once but you can always go back and update it.

2. On Amazon.com write a customer review for the Book of Mormon.
Give it a 5 star rating, and share your testimony.  If you have more time, the church has plenty of other materials on amazon that you can rate as well. 

3. Find your local church meetinghouse on Google maps, and write a review. 

Give the building a 5 stars rating!  If you're writing about the building you currently attend, extend an invitation for visitors.  The following are links to the building I attended when I was in young moens.  First find it on Google Maps.  The review will show up on Google+.  You can write reviews for any of the church buildings.  After you do your current building, if you want to do more, start with buildings you attended for a while, then do buildings you've visited.

We Believe in the Gift of Thumbs

Those who work in social media are concerned with best practices.  They want to do the best things they can so that their posts on social media get as much engagement as possible.  Engagement are the various ways that people interact with a post on social media.  This means that YOU have an impact on their success!

Types of engagement vary by social platform.  Click on a platform's name to learn more about each platform and how the church uses it.

Types of Engagement:

Facebook: Likes, Comments, Shares

Twitter: Favorites, Replies, Retweets

Google+: +1s, Comments, Shares 

Instagram: Likes, Comments

Pinterest: Likes, Comments, Pins

YouTube: Likes, Comments, Views

Tumblr: Likes, Comments, Reblog

Many of us are on the consumer side of this; we're not creating the content, we're just enjoying it!  So best practices for a social media consumer are simple: engage the content that you enjoy the most! The power is in your hands, or as we like to say here, in your thumbs!  There are lots of good consequences that come from putting your stamp of approval on a social media post by engaging with it.

One More Reason to Do Your Family History

This last Sunday at church I had an interesting impression during Sunday School. Currently my wife and I are enrolled in a Family History and Temple Work class. As we talked about why it is important for us to do family history work, I began to imagine what doing family history work might be like a hundred years from now.

I imagined my great-grandson attending a family history class like the one I was attending. Feeling inspired after church, he goes home and begins filling out a four generation pedigree chart. He does this by looking at old Facebook profiles. He can see pictures of me and read about my life. He can see that I was happily married. He can see who my parents are and see pictures of them. He can even see pictures of my grandfather, but the pictures of my grandfather do not link to another profile. He stares longingly at the photo of his great-great-great-grandfather wishing he could know more about him.