Speaker 0 00:00:00 In today's episode, we discussed six reasons why Facebook should never replace your church website. In the early days of Facebook, many church leaders thought that the social network would become the only place churches needed to be online today. It is evident that if you're putting more effort into your Facebook page than your website, you miss an enormous opportunity. We hope this conversation helps your church reach more people and grow.
Speaker 1 00:00:35 You're listening to the reach podcast. The show dedicated to helping pastors and church leaders reach people the right way, hosted by me, Thomas Costello, and with me as always is my cohost Ian Hyatt. We're here to help you your church. See more visitors and grow. Hey guys,
Speaker 0 00:01:04 Welcome to the retried podcast. Episode number 27. I am your host Thomas Costello. And with me as always is my cohost Ian Hyatt. Hey Thomas. Hey, and how's it going, man? Good to see you have a good topic to share with people today about, uh, about, uh, six reasons why your website will never be replaced by Facebook, uh, while your website, why Facebook won't replace your website, uh, anytime soon for your church there. So it's going to be a fun topic for us to discuss with, with people today, right?
Speaker 2 00:01:35 Yeah, absolutely. We've been hearing for years now. Um, you know, just with all the conversations we've had with pastors and ministry leaders about this topic, you know, I think that, Oh, maybe six, seven years ago when Facebook really started taking off, you know, as a juggernaut, if you will, uh, for social media, you know, you and I probably both heard a lot that, Oh yeah. You know, you know, we don't, we don't need a website. We're, we're jumping over to Facebook and that's where everyone's at now. And then, you know, we, we continue to, to see for years after that, that still about 85% of people would end up at a church's website before they'd physically come now, uh, Mo most certainly, uh, we are, we should probably, uh, get this out of the way right off the bat. Right. We're, we're totally pro using Facebook as a church. Yeah. And, and we actually have consulted churches for years on, uh, methods and strategies to use on Facebook and Instagram now and, and more, um, so definitely we're not anti-Facebook, but, uh, but yeah. Good topic to identify why Facebook wall won't be replacing your website.
Speaker 0 00:02:40 Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I, you and I have the privilege of having been in this industry since 2007, for me, 2006 for you, I believe. And so my space was King back when you and I started, uh, started doing this kind of stuff here. I don't know where we friends on MySpace or Facebook first. I don't know if we were on my space. I'm not sure
Speaker 2 00:03:00 We're not friends on Facebook. Uh, we were not friends on my space. No, I think my MySpace page was a little out of date when you and I connected.
Speaker 0 00:03:08 Yeah. It was devoted exclusively to celebrating Metallica probably at the time, I would guess so. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:03:13 That, I, I think I had an intro song and most certainly probably would have been a Metallica and or something like that. Those were the days.
Speaker 0 00:03:21 Right. So we've been, we've had that luxury of having seen this entire thing. Yeah. I was right there with you when people got on this and they, they, it was thought that Facebook was going to basically end the need for anybody to have websites. I could just have a Facebook page for my business. That's all that I need our Facebook page for my church. And that, that covers me. And, and what we have seen is a shift and, and really how people are understanding this. And I think that there was a long time where churches made a mistake, I would say by trying to take people from their church website and drive them onto their Facebook page. So you would see all these links on a church website, say, follow us on Facebook, click over here, like us on Facebook and driving traffic there. And as much as we want people to follow us there, they're already at the website.
Speaker 0 00:04:08 We're going to talk more reasons about why this is important, but I think this move away from, from using Facebook as a place that we send people to a place to gather people onto your website from Facebook. I think that's really a better strategy nowadays. So I think it's a good conversation. Uh, and I think it's just something where people, I think it's important for pastors to understand the why behind this. And I think that's really the heart behind this is that we want to make sure you don't just hear, like the rule is don't just turn off your website and focus on Facebook, but the why behind it, I think is what's really important with all of this.
Speaker 2 00:04:43 Absolutely, absolutely. So, and, and, and, you know, trends change over the years, but there's a lot of things that do say stay the same and have remained the same. And we'll talk about what hasn't changed with, uh, you know, the power of your website and a little bit of what hasn't changed with the power of social media. But, but yeah, so it's a, it's a good topic. Why don't you kick us off on, uh, the first item there, Thomas?
Speaker 0 00:05:05 Yeah. The, the first one is really important right out of the gate. I think. So number one, the first reason why you shouldn't put all of your efforts into Facebook and your it's not going to replace your website, is that on your website, you own the content and we didn't plan it this way, but today is a interesting day in our country. It's, uh, January the seventh. And we're recording this here. Uh, yesterday was some of the things that happened at the, at the Capitol. Uh, and this morning, uh, Mark Zuckerberg put out a post saying that, uh, president Trump is officially removed from the Facebook platform and so far be it from us to make any kind of political commentary. That's not why we bring any of this up. And you can think what you think about those decisions. That's fine. The point is, is that here we have a sitting president of the United States who even he doesn't own the content that he's putting on to Facebook and it's being removed and taken off.
Speaker 0 00:06:01 And it's just a matter of fact, is that, that you do not own anything that you put onto that social media platform. And that's really true for all social media platforms. And usually that doesn't matter too much, I will say, like, just on the day-to-day, it doesn't matter whether I own that or Facebook owns the content that I put on there, but the truth is, is that long-term, um, there, that if it happened to a sitting president, those kinds of things could happen to anybody and anybody, especially when we get into some of the rules and things about, uh, things that churches can say what's considered hate speech. There's already a lot of legislation in Europe that, uh, things that you could say in America as a church, you couldn't say in parts of Europe and things. So there is a lot to be said for, uh, the ownership of content and the legality of content that you're putting on there. And your website will never kind of let you down with those things. Whereas social media platforms, they have full control over that stuff. So I think it's been more obvious than today that ownership of your content and control over that is really important.
Speaker 2 00:07:04 Yeah, absolutely. And, and I mean, there's, there's a lot of reasons for that, but I think we've seen, and like you just said in this season of what we've gone through politically, even also what we started to see when the pandemic hit, because instantly, you know, churches kind of, they got on Facebook live for their sermons, their messages, which is great. We recommend that, do that. Um, but what they started seeing too, is that all of a sudden, maybe their service would get shut down. Uh, you know, and, and, and, or they'd put something on there and there was a copyright issue with music or something, and then that would be removed and they just didn't have control over that. And so, whereas it's a little bit different, a lot different with your website because
Speaker 0 00:07:44 The laws are probably the same, right. I think there's nobody that's going to shut you down quickly. Like Facebook would because they're on the hook for copyright copyright violations and those things. But even for us, it and retract, we put out a blog post about right, right out of the gate when we saw before all the shutdowns. But when we saw that churches are going to have to start closing doors because of the Corona virus, we tried to get in on that early, and we put out a blog post and it got a ton of traffic on just organic search engine rankings through Google and other search engines. But we got nothing. It got totally banned on Facebook and we didn't take any kind of position or give any kind of medical advice on coronavirus. It was about how churches could navigate this and how they need to get going with live streaming and that stuff.
Speaker 0 00:08:27 But just because we put that word coronavirus in our title or in some of the texts that we were sharing immediately started to getting hit by stuff. And this is just a challenge you're always going to face on social media. So if you value control over your message. And I think when it comes to things like, uh, teaching on biblical definitions of marriage, uh, teaching on God's view on the beginning and when life begins, some of those kinds of things, if you value your autonomy in these areas, I think it's all the more reason that you really shouldn't be concerned with ownership of your content, because, you know, I think every church over the next several years, you should probably, if you're teaching the Bible, you're going to touch on some of those topics on marriage. You're going to touch on life and when it begins, those kinds of things. So ownership is really important, I think.
Speaker 2 00:09:13 Yeah, absolutely. That sums it up well, and all I'll hit the next point here, the second item, um, a little bit of a change in gears, but, uh, but you can accomplish more with your website. And let me say that, let me, let me clarify that there are things that you can accomplish with Facebook, um, that you can't with your website. Um, so the, you know, as far as the, the commenting and the viral nature of it and, and someone that follows someone who commented on your post sees that, and you know, your website really can't do that as effectively, but what we've seen over the last few years, and even more so recently with everything that's transpired is that you can accomplish a lot of, I should say, specific ministry goals, a bit more with your website. For example, one thing that we've seen of course, uh, really take off is having a live streaming page.
Speaker 2 00:10:08 Of course, for churches that are shut down or for people that are not attending, uh, physically, they're going to these pages, okay, now you can live stream on Facebook, however, a live streaming page on your website. There's a lot more you can do with that. So it's a page within your website. So first of all, after someone watches a message, they can still go to your about page and get more in-depth information or find out how to serve at your church. But we've seen on these actual pages too, that someone can fill out like an online connection for a form after they watched the message, they can click to give easily these things. You can't really accomplish as much, uh, on Facebook or have right on that live streaming page where someone can submit a prayer request. There's just so much more interactive things that, that, that people can do, I should say from your side, and then you have control over.
Speaker 0 00:11:01 Yeah. So Facebook I'd be, I think it is a really good tool. And if I was live streaming a church's services, I would put them on Facebook. In addition to having them on our actual site. I think Facebook is good at some parts and your website is great at other parts. I think Facebook is really good at conversations. So it, during a live stream, if you have a sizable audience and there's, you know, a few dozen or a few hundred people watching, you can have comments and you can have conversations happening during a live service. Um, but I think some of the other things that it really, their goals and your church's goals are on polar opposite ends there. Their goal is to keep attention of your audience and keep them on the Facebook platform. And honestly, their preference is that you would watch for a while and then get distracted and stay engaged with other content on their platform.
Speaker 0 00:11:51 Because their main goal is to serve up ads to you. That's what Facebook, that's what they do. And they don't make Denny. They're not hiding that. That's just, that's what they're in business. That's what they're there to do. Your goal is to lead people into life, change through the power of Jesus Christ. Uh, and that's not really what Facebook's objective objective is with that. So, uh, it gives you just lots of opportunities when they're on your site to do some of those things. Like, you know, I'll hear saying prayer, uh, giving, um, starting down on assimilation process. Some churches have used this kind of, uh, this is, this is striking me as a little. This is a little weird to me, but the, the, uh, cyber raise your hand button. Like if you, like, you've seen that like click here to raise your hand, which is like, I guess just kind of a carry over from what we used to do in church services.
Speaker 0 00:12:34 Or, you know, maybe there's a button that says click here to walk up to the altar or, you know, something like that. And it's, uh, I don't know, but I think that that probably isn't the right approach. That's just kind of us trying to use, uh, wineskins that you, that we worked before in our churches and tried to use those wineskins in for new wine that we have now with online streaming. But I do think that having conversations, even on your own site, it keeps people there longer, which actually it brings, I think it's a good segue to number three, which is you have a captive audience on your website that you don't have on Facebook. So again, Facebook's goal is to have your audience be anything but captive, but they're just a, they're serving up algorithms that really know their audience so well. And they know what's going to keep them engaging with their platform for the longest amount of time, so they can serve up the most ads at the highest value per click for them.
Speaker 0 00:13:30 Uh, so it really is, uh, something that that's how their system works. Whereas on your site, when someone is there, you get to really keep them engaged and you get to move them around. And so there's, there's lots of reasons why this is, this is super valuable, the churches, but having people on your platform where you can help them take that next step and help them to move forward down that process and early what we call it as discipleship, helping them take steps towards the title ship. I think that's really what the gold standard is for us here.
Speaker 2 00:14:00 Yeah, that's it well said and all I'll tackle the next point here, which is you and it kind of, it's a good segue for this one too, is that you can call people to action better from your website. So you have them captive, right? So if the captive in there on your website, what they have the opportunity to do there, that they don't on Facebook is there's multiple pages. And we don't recommend you have like 9,000 pages on your website, but there's multiple pages of interest, uh, with good. Hopefully what you have on your website is good and compelling content. Now, when there's content there, information that people are actually interested in, well, then they're more likely to do something with it. We've talked a lot about calls to action before on our podcasts and we consult churches on it. But what this would be is after someone gets that information that they're after, well, they easily fill out a response form to plan a visit.
Speaker 2 00:14:54 If your church has a meeting physically to, we already kind of mentioned it, an online connection card, and you know, maybe it's a prayer request form. Maybe it's just to get more information about your church. You know, they want to talk to someone further about the kid's ministry. Well, you have so many more pages in, in, in areas of content where you can call people to action in and create a link to like a forum. And that's a tough thing. That's something you can't, you can pull people on Facebook. Of course you could do various really neat things, but to create a specific call to action where someone can fill out a form is one example. There's other calls to action, not just filling out a form, uh, but where they can take that next step. You just have a lot of power on your website and ability to do that compared to Facebook.
Speaker 0 00:15:41 Yeah, I couldn't agree more with that. I think that, um, Facebook is definitely a pay to play environment. Uh, and one thing that it's not good at is helping there, um, have people that use their content and use their platform, helping them call people to action because only they want to, they want you to pay, to call people to action. So, yeah, and I say this as someone that pays Facebook, a lot of money every single month, every single day, we pay them lots of money to serve up our ads that call people to action and ask them to fill out a form if they want to more information on a website or on getting the Google grant and getting set up with that. And so to ask people to sign up and take a step, it usually costs money. There's some work arounds for that on Facebook, but usually it takes real money to do those kinds of things.
Speaker 0 00:16:27 Whereas on your website, you have free reign to do that. Um, we've said before, the analogy of you would never preach a sermon and then just say to someone, Hey, so if you like that, great, you have a nice day. You always call people to action. You always give them an invitation to respond, to make a decision, to follow Jesus, to take a next step. And I think if you're missing that on online, you're missing a really big opportunity and you usually are missing it. If you're focusing completely on social media channels like Facebook, if you're on your website, it gives you so many opportunities to ask people, to give, to take the next step, uh, in the assimilation process to become a member, to give their lives to Jesus, whatever it would be. Um, there's lots of opportunities to call people, to take another step on that, which is really important.
Speaker 2 00:17:15 That's great stuff. That's great.
Speaker 0 00:17:16 Cool. Uh, number five, let me hit that. Uh, your website takes precedence with searches. Uh, Facebook does not. And let me explain a little bit as to why and why this is so important. Um, the lifespan of something on your website is as long as you keep it on your website, uh, and most of the content that churches produce I find is usually what we would call evergreen content, which means like a tree. It stays green and fresh all the time. Uh, whereas the content that you put on to all social media, but specifically Facebook, they have a very short life cycle. Uh, so a posts that I put out there today, it has a very limited reach by tomorrow. It's almost seeing nobody and therefore it doesn't come up in search engines or those things, uh, unless some really strange circumstances happen. Your post that you wrote three years ago are never going to show up on search engines anymore.
Speaker 0 00:18:15 Now people are in the habit of looking at old tweets and that kind of stuff, but still, you don't find old tweets coming up on search engines, whereas with a website, your content almost always can come up even years after the fact. So a little insight into some of our numbers here at retried. So we, we do a blog post every week there's times where we've done two posts a week, but we've been doing this for four years now. Uh, there's one of the first posts that we put onto our site was, uh, it was, uh, 11 church statistics. You need to know for 2016. So we put that out there in January of 2016 and it slowly got some traction. But to this day, these statistics from 2016, they're still getting 30, 40 hits. Every single day of people clicking on there, getting onto our website, we get to have conversations with them.
Speaker 0 00:19:03 Sometimes they fill out forms to get more information about using our services. That's something that churches can take advantage of too, because you know, we serve, we have the, the most evergreen content in the history of humanity, the gospel, right? It doesn't ever change. Our, our content has been the same. The, the messages that were written thousands of years ago are still valuable to today. So whether they're blog posts or sermons or whatever they are, we are creating constant evergreen content. If you're putting that onto Facebook, it's invisible, the search engines almost immediately, if you're putting it onto your website, it's there and it can be served up for years to come. So what do you have to add to that again?
Speaker 2 00:19:44 All right. In other words, kind of what you're saying is the kind of the comparison with a fly's lifespan compared to like a certain turtle that can live 900 years. So, but as far as evergreen, so no, I think you, you hit it on the head. I think that that's the thing is a lot of people, they don't realize that search engines are prioritizing a website too. So, you know, they, when someone Googles your, which is, this is what most people are doing now, they're either Googling churches near me or lunch near me, or whatever they're interested in. They're they're doing that. What Google and the search engines, namely Google is looking for is a website to direct them to. So I think that's just one thing you kind of touched on that, but just to remind people, is that it and think about this too, even if you're, if you had a, didn't have a website and your Facebook link pops up, when someone does that search, not, everyone's interested in going to just follow you on social media right away. That's got to be kind of bought in and already know someone maybe has, has shared how amazing your church is or something like to that effect. So that's another good thing for pastors.
Speaker 0 00:20:55 Let me add this here, too, to what you're saying. I think you're, you're exactly right on is that sometimes you'll see the church's Facebook page be the first thing that comes up. If they have a really bad website or no website, you'll see just a Facebook page. Well, first of all, um, I don't really, I know a lot of people under 25, I don't know any of them that use Facebook. So a lot of them don't have Facebook accounts. They have Instagram accounts and those things, but a lot of them don't use Facebook. So your, your, this is something that are going to almost always just tune out immediately if you're not on that platform. So you're missing a lot of the younger generation, but let me give some, some quick, like a little thing that I guess I've learned about search engine optimization over the years.
Speaker 0 00:21:33 And I think this is something that a lot of churches miss that helps clear this up a little bit. So yes, if you use Facebook primarily as a church and you don't use your website as much, you can get your church web, like your, your, your profile page for your church to rank. Like, so that can be the first thing that comes up. If you like for most churches, if you do a search for the church, you'll see their website, the next result will probably be either a Facebook posts or a Facebook profile or a Yelp page. Those kinds of things for the church, we'll be able to come up second and third. Uh, so that's what you'll usually find, but the way that most people get onto church websites that are doing a good job with search engine work is they're not getting onto your homepage because yeah, that's able to help you get people that are typing in churches near me.
Speaker 0 00:22:22 And that's a lot of people that are hungry and looking for churches, but when people are looking for other topics, how great would it be? Is if, if you pre created a lot of content on marriage and how to, how to have a successful marriage and how, if your marriage is in the tank, how to, how to turn things around and how to get victory over addiction and marriages and pornography, and those kinds of things that happen. If you got a lot of content around that, so that when people in your city started searching for those topics, that your posts would come up, not your home page, but the articles and the sermon series and the trainings that you've done on that kind of content. And you could actually give people something to people that's where a lot of these search engine battles are won and lost for churches. So I think a lot of churches missed that. So yeah, having, having your homepage rank, you know, that's great, but really where the value is, is in having a lot of your content that you're putting on your site, your sermons, your blog, posts, your trainings, those kinds of things. Having those rank, you have to have them on your website, not on social media platforms.
Speaker 2 00:23:19 Absolutely. Yeah. Good. You finishing point there on that, that one, that one, I think had a lot of good, good content for our, our listeners there. So to apply and last but not least I'll cover the, the last one here. It still is your website, your main marketing and communication hub. Um, so, and here's the re for obvious reasons with everything that we've discussed here today, it is a big win, but what we saw, I, you and I, again, you've mentioned have been doing this since 2006, 2007. Well, we saw towards the beginning, uh, of, of websites, uh, even before Facebook became huge, was that churches would try to use it for everything. So meaning D the website was not only an outreach and marketing tool, but it was also how, the only way they really communicated to their members, we saw things like, and these are some of these things are still relevant, like a prayer wall.
Speaker 2 00:24:13 And then we saw, uh, what, what was the other one where they had the, uh, ah, you know, the name's escaping me where it was a back and forth. Not, I'm not a blog of course, but a message board. That's what, so that the message board. And then it was also the tool where, you know, all of the leaders went to go get a, you know, there was a password protected area. And again, some of these things can still apply. It could still be a tool. It still is a communication tool, but everything was weighted on that now, thanks to social media like Facebook, Instagram, and more, and also now, uh, thanks to church database, software systems out there, he CRMs, um, we don't have to just rely upon the website, but as you mentioned earlier, if we're doing it right, everything is going to funnel back to your website, you know, uh, you know, if they find you, if they do find you on Facebook first, they're still going to want to usually get more information. They're still gonna end up at the website before too long. So that'll funnel back there. Um, so it still is, and we've seen since the pandemic, it, as far as communication is concerned because of the control of content, like we've talked about because now of live, live streaming and on demand messages that are needed, it is that communication tool for, for members to get to her, uh, updates and those things there. So still is that main hub for those reasons and anything you would add to that?
Speaker 0 00:25:37 No, I think you're exactly right. I think that, um, we we've moved away in a lot of ways from it being the main hub for things like, you know, having forms and, you know, expense reimbursement forms and those things you don't need to put that, just get a Dropbox for your church and share it that way, or put it in your Google drive. This need to be on the, on the website for all this stuff behind a password protected screen. And a lot of those things have changed, but yeah, I think that it is kind of the, it's the unifying factor. I think the way that churches should have things set up is your Facebook account. Um, it should, one of its primary goals should be to drive traffic back to your website. And the same thing goes for your Twitter account. If you have one and your Instagram account, if you have one and everything should be pointing people back to the website, because that is where you have the most control and you can help people take the most next right steps and they can kind of move down the, down the assimilation and like, uh, the connection process with your church and the discipleship process that all can happen best on the website.
Speaker 0 00:26:33 So it is still the best hub. It is, uh, you know, before websites, there was the church foyer and there was that time you could get together and people would have to have all those conversations happening right there. Uh, but really your website lets you have a central place of communication that, yeah, I mean, it's, it's kind of funny to think that it's only been, you know, when we started doing this, most churches didn't have websites. Like that was a new thing. Like, like now we hardly ever talked to an established church that doesn't have a website, but you know, back in 2006, 2007, most of them, this is their first website, but it's crazy to think only 13 short years churches mostly communicated in the foyer and during announcements at bulletins to today, it's not even close, you know how much we can communicate on, on a website.
Speaker 0 00:27:20 So yeah, I hope that was helpful, uh, for our audience here today. Anything to add as we close. No, no, I hopefully this was helpful, like you said. And uh, and, and yeah, again, just to make it clear, you know, use as much social media that's relevant for your church and who you're trying to target as, as possible, but don't neglect your website. You don't neglect either. All of these things can work really well together. They're, they're not, uh, if you're doing it right, they're not competing with one another. They're complimenting one another. Exactly. If we're doing it right. So, yep. That's exactly right. So, well good. We'll leave it at that for today. Want to thank our audience for joining us today? Um, if this has been something that's been helpful for you, uh, it means the world to us. If you would rate, review, subscribe, or hit the like button, if you're watching us on, uh, on Facebook, like we talked about, uh, to be clear, this goes onto our website first. Uh, and that's where we host all of this here. It's on our website, but we do put it onto social media channels. Again, these things working in tandem, so hit the like button subscribe and uh, it means a lot to us. Give us a comment too, if you have any questions at all. All right. One, any other topics discussed on this podcast going forward? Uh, we're all about that. We love hearing what our audience is looking for. So, uh, thanks guys for watching and listening and we'll catch you next week.
Speaker 1 00:28:34 See ya. Thanks for listening to the reach right podcast. We hope this episode will help you reach people the right way. Looking for more resources for your church. Check us out
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