Twelfth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

Social media technologies has offered organizations the opportunity to reach a global population and to achieve deeper purposes. However, to acquire the maximum benefit from social media technologies, they should continue developing strategies that enhance their virtual experience. Public religious institutions eagerly adopt the norms of the digital age and continue developing new media strategies for religious purposes. This paper explores the strategies that Omani digital preachers utilize in their mission to encourage community religious engagement. I discuss such strategies to demonstrate the intersection of Islamic preaching and the communication attributes of different social media platforms. This study explores broader questions about technological and communicational strategies of digital preachers: what are the common strategies utilized by preaching account administrators?; Is there a specialization in the use of different social media platforms in terms of purposes like advertising spiritual events, connecting populations, and content management and presentation?; Did this utilization of strategies lead to the emergence of strategic patterns?; And how different are these patterns from the general patterns? I analyse different types of spiritual social media accounts. These analyses take two dimensions: vertical or chronological dimension, and horizontal direction in which I explore the content and the way it is presented. Using accounts on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter as archives, and semi structured interviews with the accounts’ administrators, I explore the visual, editorial, and other techniques to capture the characteristics of the preaching accounts and any unique features in terms of utilized strategies.