In the last podcast, in episode 61, we talked about your goals of using Twitter, and I want to pick up on that discussion here. Pastor John, what are some strategies for stewarding a Twitter platform well? One is practice a fast. In other words, kick up a period of time, week, or like for me, two years ago, eight months, zero Twitter, zero blogging, and see what happens to your soul.

See if your soul has become addicted to being known, being followed, being read, and just don't even write anymore and don't read anymore for X amount of time. That's a Twitter fast or a blogging fast. The last thing I would say is pray over every tweet. Just say, "God bless this," even if it's a joke, even if you're pointing to money-winning humor, say, like Kevin DeYoung does on his blog.

Money-mourning humor. I do not doubt that Kevin chooses very consciously why he does that, thinks it through, prays over it, and I think that's what we all should do. Do you check your mentions or comments from followers to hear what they're saying about things you've posted on Twitter? Every now and then, I do and I don't really find it that helpful because for every person who says, "Thank you.

It was a great help. Somebody has given me the F word." I don't think I can look enough to draw any valid conclusions. I'd have to look at it and do some sophisticated analysis to say, "Okay, 72% of the people said they got help and 30% thought it was hogwash.

Surely the 70% are right." Well, maybe, maybe not. For me, it's much more spiritually safe to go to the Lord and say, "Here's something I think would be helpful for me to say," to think through how to say it best and then say it, and then I've got you and David and Jonathan and Marshall and Josh and John and Scott who I'm going to believe if it wasn't helpful, they're coming back to me.

So Josh did that. Josh sent me a nice paragraph saying that one of the tweets I sent out just wasn't worded in a way that was helpful and I said, "You're right. You're right." So I didn't need to do any research. I've got you guys around me to help me.

Maybe not everybody has that, but frankly, I'm so wired to love the praise of men that for me, it's more spiritually unhelpful to read what's being said than to just keep speaking. Here's kind of the way I view media like this. I'm basically a writer-preacher for a church and for books and for conferences, and I want my preaching ministry to be the main thing and my wider writing ministry.

Twitter and these other things are spillover and I'm just scattering. I exist to spread a passion for the Supremacy of God in all things, and I just want those to be used as well as they can, but the bread and butter is over here on the more substantial things that I'm speaking and working on.

Here's a related follow-up question. When you go to the DG blog and you look at the posts that you've written currently right now in the way that the website is designed, the Facebook and Twitter statistics are very prominent. You can see those right by the headline. How do you read those statistics?

What do those mean to you, if anything? I'm not even sure what you're talking about. Okay, excellent. Well, on the DG blog to the right of the blog banner or the image at the top of the blog post, there will be a statistic for Facebook likes and retweets on Twitter.

Is it just a little gauge for the popularity of a post? All right, maybe I'll look at that. So what was your question? Okay, yeah, well that totally undermines the question, so we'll move on. No, no, here in principle I can say this. I'm glad. I mean, I just got an email from Josh, who's Director of Communications at Desiring God this morning, reminding me what our goals were internationally for this year, and among those goals were generally on the blog, we want to see I think like a 20% increase of people who visit and for those outside non-English, I forget what, 35%, 40% increase.

Well now, that's a goal. We exist to spread. Our goal is not to have fewer and fewer people reading what we write on this blog. Our goal is to spread, and therefore the people that are charged to strategically reach the greatest number of people have got to look at those statistics.

Are we reaching our goals? If not, would there be strategies we could follow that would help us reach more people without altering the truth that we love? Excellent. Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for listening to this awkward podcast. Please email your Twitter questions to us at AskPastorJohn@DesiringGod.org.

You'll find thousands of other free resources online from John Piper at DesiringGod.org. I'm your host, Tony Ranke. Thanks for listening.