Social Media Strategy for Churches

Online is where the majority of people go to find information, and having a Facebook, Instagram or twitter account for your Church will show those who are looking for a Church about the culture of your Church, basic information about where you are located, opening times and most importantly, your vision as a Church.

Furthermore, social media appeals to the younger audience, and it is crucial to encourage the youth to come to Church and bring their ideas and innovations so that they can also enjoy Church.

So, perhaps you’re a church and have just started out with social media, or maybe you have even been doing social media for a while now but are not sure that you are posting the right things. So you find yourself just stuck for ideas and have been asking yourself, 'What should our church social media consist of?'

Well, you need to have a strategy for what to post for your social media which should consist of the purpose of your posts and what to post. This will help to give you a real focus for your social media.

Ideally, the purpose of each of your posts should be the following:

1. To encourage spiritual practice

2. To provoke meaningful engagement

3. To tell your story – Which will be specific to your church using:

• Photos of your church members

• Life changing testimonials

• Your pastors quote or an excerpt from a recent sermon

• Well wishes to your church leaders / or even members

• Shout out thank you messages to those who serve at the church

• Events that will and have taken place

 When posting, it is a good idea to mix up your posts and not have the same types of posts all the time.

So here are some ideas to help:

1. Asking a question – To your members / followers. This helps people to interact with you. When they then post a comment or a response, their friends may see it and then that starts the viral effect. This encourages a 2-way relationship and engagement with your members.

2. Interesting Images – Visual posts get the most attention. This could be in a form of a photo or a video (which seem to be increasing in popularity). You need to grab the attention of the person scrolling through their phone to make them stop scrolling, and a powerful image can certainly do this.

3. Educational content – This is where your sermons or Bible classes, or anything that will give the other person more knowledge and understanding of the Christian faith and of the Word of God. This should be a key focus in your posts. – With these, you could decide to post the whole sermon, or a perhaps just a ‘teaser’ of your sermon to give them that initial interest for them to come back to watch the full sermon.

4. Entertaining Content – Don’t be afraid to use entertaining content. This can include news content & also fun quizzes or games.

5. Opinionated Content – Giving your opinion on a recent news or event can capture the interest of many people. However, it is probably safer to stay away from any politics.

6. Infographics – This provides your followers with information, knowledge or some data using visual graphics to represent this i.e. showing a graph of how many men vs women go to church; the decline in church numbers; the numbers of churches online; number of churches using social media.

7. Promotion of special events in the calendar year, including special Christmas / Easter services etc. – But please note that promotions of events should be kept at a minimum.

Post Ideas

So here are some post ideas that you could try out:

1. Countdown timer with a call to prayer – You could call for the church to pray for a specific group of people i.e. the youth, single mothers, married people, the elderly, Government, those in war, people who are yet to encounter Christ.

2. Anniversaries – Celebrate key moments that happened in your church i.e. This time last year, we started our children’s ministry; 5 years since our associate pastor has been with us; move into a new building – And comment on how far you have come as a church.

3. Fun engagement – Like quizzes

4. Bible Reading – Videos from different members of your church doing a Bible reading would be fantastic

5. Questions such as, Is this a myth or a fact? – Look for Bible verses / stories and ask whether this is true or false.

6. Eliminate – If you had to eliminate one thing, what would it be?

7. Two Opposing ideas together and ask people which one they think is right i.e. church online / in-person.

8. The Bible doesn’t say that

9. And last, but certainly not least, Church Invitation – To be posted on Saturday. – This can help to build anticipation for Sunday’s service.

How to go Viral and Reach More People

Going viral is a real dream for not only organisations, but also churches. Can you imagine what going viral would mean for your church, or more importantly, the lives of the many people that find you and hear your message.

The main two focus points in attempting to go viral are:

1. Using great high value content is crucial – This will allow your posts to be organically found.

2. Don’t be afraid to Ask people to like, follow, comment and share with others!

Individual Social Media TIPS

So, although all platforms generally have the same idea of great content and engagement, each platform has slightly different approaches to posting.

Again, with all platforms, it’s all about posting great and high value content that people actually want to see.

This can take a considerable amount of time to produce. So, we always recommend outsourcing your social media or getting a dedicated person to take on this role and to manage it.

So here goes:

FACEBOOK

Ideally, post at least 2-3+ times a week.

Tell stories and share real life situations and testimonies with your followers.

Communicate and engage with your followers (talk to them; ask questions), instead of trying to force them into anything.

Avoid using links within posts. Perhaps put them into the comments instead.

Post back as your page.

Always aim to have your image relating to your content.

Mix up the type of posts that you have.

Have a look at what other successful churches are posting and see what works well with them.

Try posting in out of work hours (especially late at night after 10pm) when people tend to have switched off and are relaxing. This can easily be scheduled.

TWITTER

It’s always a good idea to set up a Twitter account (because you can link it to other places / platforms) even if you do not regularly post on it.

I say this because, I believe that Twitter may generally, not be the best platform to use if you are a small local church. I would say that it’s a better suited platform if you are a celebrity, or you have a mega church.

However, if you do post,

Again, with the hashtags, keep them minimal and relevant.

Always link your church / organisation website in your bio.

You may be able to engage with and retweet other churches and / Christian organisations.

LINKEDIN

LinkedIn is great for networking with other churches and Christian organisations to see if there are ways in which you can help each other.

I hope that this information, along with the ideas and tips will really help you to get started with your social media.

If you haven’t already, do have a look at out other blogs on social media and churches to see how they can also give you further insight.

In the meantime, do look out for more on strategy in our next blog.