Members react to general conference via social media

More and more members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are following the encouragement of leaders and embracing social networking as a means of sharing the gospel.

"It is no coincidence that FamilySearch and other tools have come forth at a time when young people are so familiar with a wide range of information and communication technologies,” said Elder David A. Bednar, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve, during his remarks in the Saturday afternoon session of the church’s 181st Semiannual General Conference. “Your fingers have been trained to text and tweet to accelerate and advance the work of the Lord — not just to communicate quickly with your friends. The skills and aptitude evident among many young people today are a preparation to contribute to the work of salvation.”

While Elder Bednar and other general authorities spoke on Saturday and Sunday, members watched conference or listened via TV, Internet or radio. In the process, they tweeted and posted quotes, thoughts, feeling and impressions for the world to see.

“About to be spiritually blown away — at LDS Conference Center,” one person posted on Facebook.

"Watching #LDSConf on Lds.org — it's not just for Mormons! If you're looking for spiritually uplifting stuff you should check it out," Jason Koertge tweeted on Saturday.

“Elder Hales’ talk makes me think about my patient & long suffering dad who waits upon the Lord in his trials & my mom who happily serves him,” Broadway actress Natalie Hill tweeted about Elder Robert D. Hales' talk.

At various times during the weekend, the hashtag #LDSconf was trending on Twitter. (A hashtag is a tag or keyword prefixed by a hash symbol that accompanies a Twitter post or tweet. The posts containing a relevant hashtag can be searched and indexed efficiently.) At one point, #LDSconf accounted for .11 percent (approximately 220,000) of the total tweets on Twitter (more than 200 million per day), according to trendistic.com.

Other hashtags about conference included #twitterstake and #pajamachurch.

Last April, .14 percent (approximately 98,000) of the total tweets on Twitter (70 million tweets a day) carried the hashtag #LDSConf.

Among the trending topics were LDS Church President Thomas S. Monson, Elder Hales, the Provo Tabernacle and the Book of Mormon. While most tweets were in English, many others emerged in Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish, including tweets by Radio Kolob, an online Spanish language radio station.