What are the characteristics of viral stories in the Christian space? At Zoecity, we attempt to answer this question by examining the how, what, where, when and why of sharing. Here’s a quick snapshot of the content we aggregated for January 2010.
There were 6 major stories shared that was significantly higher than everything else in January. Looking at the chart, you can see the sudden spikes in sharing activity and the corresponding stories. Our criteria for story inclusion is whether or not an article is relevant, influential or impacting to Christians.
We noticed that our top stories were broken to the following categories.
Spiritual Growth: Albert Mohler on evangelical discernment
Current Events: Brit Hume on Tiger Woods, Haiti earthquake and Tim Tebow
Law & Politics: President Obama says Interpol jurisdiction above US constitution
Leadership: Michael Hyatt on being indespensable
The biggest story of all was actually not about the Haiti earthquake itself. This story had already been covered ad nauseam by mainstream media. The actual story revolved around Pat Robertson’s statement that Haitians sold their soul to the devil and now reap God’s judgement.
Don Miller responds to Pat Robertson’s statements on Relevant magazine and this was our number one story of the month. It took in a total of 1,142 shares in January. The total share count has accumulated to an amazing 2,881 shares (2,587 on Facebook, 294 on Twitter) since then.
The other major noteworthy Haiti story was written by Jean Gelin, a pastor from a Haitian-American church. He researched and dispelled the Haiti devil worship myth. What was truly surprising about this article was not just its impact, but rather its relevance to the whole matter. Jean Gelin actually published his article 5 years ago. But it made the number two highest article of the month (728 shares) because it suddenly became relevant, influential and impacting to Christians on that month.
This is what we at Zoecity hope to achieve, every day, every week and every month with our top stories compilation. We pull the best (defined as most popular for now) and bring it to you, wherever you are, whether its on our homepage, by RSS feed, on our newsletter, on our Twitter feed or our Facebook feed.
Have you ever wondered which Christian website is getting the most traction in terms of viral content on social networks? Well, wonder no more! In the next few weeks we will begin rolling out more in-depth analysis of the top Christian websites and articles.
There are many questions that can be answered by the data we collect. In what categories are the most viral content generated? What’s gaining traction in the minds of Christians? What current events and issues have the most impact, influence and relevance? These are but a few of the questions we seek to answer.
In the meantime, here’s a preview of some the reports we’ll be generating the in future.
January 2010 Top 10 Most Viral Christian Websites
Domain (total shares)
onenewsnow.com (5431)
relevantmagazine.com (2599)
michaelhyatt.com (2135)
desiringgod.org (2075)
thegospelcoalition.org (1869)
lifesitenews.com (1350)
theresurgence.com (1276)
albertmohler.com (1187)
stuffchristianslike.net (1141)
christianpost.com (1129)
The number one most viral Christian website for January 2010 is OneNewsNow.com, a division of the American Family News network. It accumulated a total of 5,431 shares aggregated from all its articles that appeared in Facebook and Twitter. Here’s an except from their “About Us” page.
Whether it’s a story about prayer in public schools, workplace restrictions on Christians, or battles for biblical truth within our denominations, the American Family News Network (AFN) is here to tell you what the newsmakers are saying.
Congratulations to OneNewsNow for making the most impact to Christians in the social media for January 2010!
Colin Wong
CEO, Zoecity
Zo.e - Greek for “life”
Zo.e.city - The essence of life
Many of you may not be aware that ZoeCity had its initial start in late 2007 as a Christian social network. MySpace was the big social network giant at that time. Mainstream kids were catching on to social networking, but their parents were struggling to make sense of this online socialization. Stories of teenage suicide, cyber bullying, and sexual predators were rampant in this new frontier and created an atmosphere of fear and concern in the Christian community.
That atmosphere inspired us to work toward the goal of providing “a safe place” away from MySpace. We created the best privacy controls available at that time. Facebook has only recently made changes that are approaching what we provided. We launched the original ZoeCity site on March 8th, 2008. Toby Mac, one of the most successful Christian music artists today, made ZoeCity his home. We powered his social network as well as his website. We had the capability to allow musical artists, churches and Christian organizations to build their social networks using the ZoeCity platform. Our strategy was to go after large Christian ministries and load their members top-down by the hundreds of thousands into ZoeCity.
In mid 2008, along came the greatest financial crisis to hit the world since the 1930s. We got caught like a deer in headlights and our pipeline disappeared overnight. Non-profit organizations were laying people off and downsizing. Charitable giving had dried up. Internet initiatives were the last thing anyone was thinking about. We had to take a serious look at ourselves and what we had created. We took a few months to carefully re-examine our position in terms of our value proposition and where we actually stood in the industry.
By late 2008 the landscape had changed significantly. Facebook had overtaken MySpace as the new darling of social media. Facebook made some incredibly smart and strategic moves. They opened up their platform and thousands of applications were being built on their social network by third party companies. Then they opened up their social graph by allowing other websites to connect and integrate with them.
It became obvious to us that the value proposition of a Christian social network had disappeared. There was no longer a demand for a “safe place to live”. Facebook was “good enough” and mainstream Christians had become much more comfortable with social networking. More importantly, everyone wanted to be where all their friends were. They did not want to socialize with just Christians in one place, and with everyone else in another.
We came to the realization that our approach to social networking was fundamentally flawed. We are to be the light of the world and the salt of the earth. Instead of getting Christians to come to us, we have the amazing opportunity to bring Christ to the world. If we can bring the Christian context to where people reside, i.e. Facebook/Twitter, then we bring great light into where it is dim.
Our fundamental mission statement has always been to connect Christians to the content and people they care about. Instead of building Christian content and trying to convince users to come into our social network, we now aggregate the world’s best Christian content and bring it to where the users are, on Facebook, Twitter and other distribution channels. So that is how ZoeCity, a Christian social network, became Zoecity, a Christian content discovery website. It took 12 months of extremely hard work to get us to where we are today.
Zoecity re-launched on February 3rd, 2010. We’re still a young, inexperienced and growing company. It is certain that we will make some mistakes along the way. But I absolutely feel that we’re finally on the right path. We have great faith that this is what we have been called to do. It is my earnest hope that Zoecity will serve a great purpose in God’s plan.
Our sincere aim is to ignite people with creative thoughts, discussions and practical action so that Christians can make an informed, godly response to what is happening in their world on any given day.
Colin Wong
CEO, Zoecity
