Maximize Church Social Media

This section is not intended to be a complete guide to everything you could possibly do with or use for Church Social Media. But, you will find a simple strategy that can help increase the reach of your church when you put these steps in place.

Step 1: Choose your Social Media Platforms then Setup & Connect your Accounts

There are different approaches to choosing which Social Media sites you want to use for your church.

The most important part of this choice should be finding out which sites your Church Members and your Community use most. These should probably get your greatest effort.

But there are automated ways for you to be on more sites than you can manually keep up with.

Some people do not believe you should be on a social media site unless you put in the effort to format all of your content for that specific site. For instance, if you post an Instagram picture formatted to look great there, they do not think you should use that same picture for a Facebook post.

I think that is overthinking it. Would it be better to format and maximize your church social media content for each site? Probably so, but we all have limited time and resources. The average person is not criticizing your photo formatting. To me it would be better to be on that site with a slightly incorrect format than not be on there at all.

That said, there are certain limitations that you do want to stay within. You most likely do not want to copy and paste a 3 paragraph Facebook post into a Twitter post. That would just get cropped off and not be good for the end user.

So what do you do? You can use tools that allow you to connect and autopost to multiple accounts.

One of the most well known tools you can use is HOOTSUITE at www.hootsuite.com. You can even use your church Gmail account to login to make it easier to use.

You can reach more people more easily by connecting accounts so that when you post to one site it also autoposts to another site. This way you only have to post content once and you post to multiple Social Media accounts.

Another benefit to this is that you can schedule your posts and have a months worth of content coming out automatically and you only have to set it up at the beginning of the month.

Hootsuite currently allows you to schedule and autopost content for free to a limited number of your Social Media accounts including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, WordPress & Instagram. You can pay to add more than the limited number of accounts if you want.

The Instagram App iteslf lets you post pictures and video to Instagram then autopost that to your Facebook and Twitter, so you accomplish the same thing as Hootsuite for your Instagram pictures.

I would use Hootsuite to post to Facebook and Twitter. Then use the Instagram app to post your pictures to Facebook and Twitter. Instagram is currently primarily a mobile app so you will need to post those pictures from a mobile device.

Another free tool for autoposting your WordPress blog and podcast posts to Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn is dlvrit.com. Every time you create a new post or blog podcast post it will automatically post to your Social Media for you. It has a free trial option, but most likely you would need to pay to keep using it.

Go ahead and setup your Social Media, Hootsuite and dlvrit accounts if you want to use those and keep your login information in your Local Promotion Resource Document.

Step 2: Optimize your Church Social Media account Profiles

When you do not do your best to completely fill in your Social Media account profiles it looks very unprofessional or worse that your church is not even open.

Take the time to go to your account profile settings and fill in all of the areas that you have answers for. You will not need to fill in every blank as a lot of them apply only to businesses, but do what you can to make your profiles complete.

Write out descriptions thinking about how a potential new Church Visitor would read and understand them. Do not just write your descriptions for your Church Members unless you are creating a closed volunteer group or something like that.

One other note… be careful how you word your hours of operation. This can make your church look closed on Sundays or during midweek Services. Make sure you at least look OPEN when you are having Services even if you just have to include this in your main descriptions.

Step 3: Stylize your Church Social Media account Profiles

You will want to include a 300 by 300 pixel Church Logo formatted for the web at 72dpi most likely for each of your accounts. The size varies from platform to platform so you may want to check for the best image optimization and size.

In addition to the logo, most sites also have space for header images, and each site uses different sizes. So you will need to create specific sized header graphics for each site.

One key to helping you build TRUST with your Church Members and Community people visiting your site is to have the same consistent look across ALL of your Church Social Media sites. So once you have a design for a header graphic, all you do for the other sites is move the elements around to fit into the new dimensions for that site header.

There are a couple of options for help with this if you are not a Graphic Artist or you do not have access to one.

1: Canva.com – This site operates similar to Photoshop, but is very easy to use and is FREE for now at least.

There are some free graphic options built in and you can format text. Plus any images you upload are free for you to use and it stores them for future use. It also has templates on the front page for nearly all of the header graphic image sizes you will need for your Social Media so you do not have to figure out the sizes.

2: FIVERR.com – This is the site we mentioned in the START HERE Section and through the site that gives you access to hundreds of creatives and graphic artists that start prices at $5. If you want quality work at cheap prices to give you graphics for your various social media headers, this is the place to start your search.

Step 4: Maximize your Church Social Media Content

At this point you should have your accounts setup, optimized, graphics in place and your automation setup with Hootsuite and potentially dlvrit.

So what can you post? That is really up to your church and your creativity, but here is a list of some ideas to get you started and help you maximize church social media for your situation.

Upcoming Event Information
Video Commercials for Events
Upcoming Sermon Series Promotion & Information
Links to your Podcast Sermons
Video Announcements
Text, Audio or Video Testimony Stories from Church Members
Video Recaps of Past Events
Picture Galleries of Past Events
Picture of the Pastor or Crowd with a Quote from the Sermon each week
Break down the Sermon into Quotes and post one a day from the past week’s sermon either as text or a Scripture Picture
Volunteer of the Week Interviews
Ministry Overview & Highlight Videos
Congratulate Local Sports Teams on Wins
Post links to local News Stories where your Members are Highlighted or Mentioned
Shout Outs to individuals and groups who helped with Volunteer Projects
Pictures of Church Members helping with Community Events and Outreaches

Of course, you have to be careful with some of these ideas. Some parents may not want you to post up close pictures of their kids for example. This is especially true in foster homes as it may not even be legal, and for sure may be dangerous to the children.

But realize that most people will not share and pass on your upcoming event information unless it is an exciting community focused event. But, people WILL typically pass on a video story or pictures of past events that are fun and tell a story.

Use your creativity and come up with a simple plan to create content that your members will share with their connections.