Mastering Church Instagram Reels: Crafting Stories that Connect

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Well, one of the biggest opportunities that every church has right now is to leverage Instagram reels. And in this conversation, we're going to unpack some of the tips and tricks that we've picked up that will help you reach more people and increase those views on Instagram. Let's do this. You're listening to the reach, right? Podcast, the show dedicated to helping your church reach more people and grow. Well, hey, guys, I'm Thomas. [00:00:29] Speaker B: And I'm Ian. [00:00:30] Speaker A: And today we're talking about mastering church Instagram reels. And this is a really important topic, I think, for churches nowadays. It is probably along with TikTok and YouTube shorts and Facebook reels, it is the biggest opportunity for churches of all sizes to reach a much wider audience than they reach on Sunday mornings. It's a huge, huge opportunity. It is something that we are pretty passionate about. We, as an organization here at Reachrite, have seen enormous reach from doing these short form videos. And we're going to talk about some of the things we've picked up that are going to help your church reach more people with your Instagram reels. Specifically in this conversation today. [00:01:16] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm excited about it because I think even though a lot of churches are doing this now, there's a lot that aren't. And also there's a lot, I think, that just maybe they are struggling with ideas and the approach to take on the reels. So this hopefully should be helpful for a lot of folks. [00:01:32] Speaker A: Yeah, I saw a post from someone just the other day where they mentioned that they did an informal survey of their pastor audience on Twitter, and they found that a very small minority, this is specifically about TikTok, but they found that a very small minority, like 10% of their pretty connected churches were using TikTok. So doing short form video on TikTok, only 10%, whereas that is the primary way and the primary social media platform for Gen Z. So if we're interested in reaching that generation, certainly TikTok. But in this case, we're talking about Instagram reels. I think that is really important to make sure we're talking about it. So let's take a step back and just talk about what is Instagram reels. Maybe if you're newer to this whole game, it is something that we were familiar with the Instagram feed. That's what kind of everybody started using originally on Instagram. You'd scroll through and look at photos and those kinds of things on there, and then they started prioritizing video, and there were things like Instagram tv, if you remember that, that came up for a while, something they tried to do. There's also Instagram Stories, which is something that I think younger people. It's kind of like the snapchat for Instagram. It's there, that's the little circles on top of your phone when you're scrolling through Instagram. But Instagram reels are those videos that you see that pop up on your feed. If you ever wind up watching one of those, you'll wind up being moved over to the Instagram reels feed. And it's just like all the other platforms, like TikTok or Facebook reels or YouTube shorts, all the same thing. Basically it's short form video where they suggest and the algorithm gives new videos for people to watch that they think that they will like based on their viewing history, their interactions, those kinds of things that they've done there before. So the question that we're wrestling with today is what can a church do to perform better and make sure that they show up on there? And that's what we want to try and unpack here a little bit today. [00:03:40] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, I guess we should dig right in. We have some tips and some tricks that we recommend, I guess if that's the way we're going to put it. Reels, tips and tricks. And the first one is maybe often overlooked, but we recommend this big time, is stick to a schedule. So obviously you want to have a schedule. This is not just every so often when it comes to mind type thing. There's really good reasons to stick to a schedule, for sure. [00:04:12] Speaker A: Yeah, this seems simple, but this is the most important advice we will give you in this whole episode is that if you are going to be serious about any social media platform, but especially Instagram reels, you want to stick to a schedule and do it consistently, commit to something and you have to actually do it the same way. And I think the schedule should be a weekly kind of a schedule. So I'm not saying like stick to a schedule, that we'll do one Instagram reel per quarter. That's not what we're talking about. So the schedule, it needs to be on a weekly basis. And I'm not here to tell you how often you should be doing it weekly. Our research, our research here at Reachwrite, it shows that three is a great number. If you can pull that off, if you can execute three Instagram reels per week, that would be really good. But to me, the number really isn't as important as the consistency that you would stick to something. So if you're just getting started in this, I would recommend that you probably just start with one. Commit to doing one Instagram reel every single week for six months. Commit to doing that and saying that I'm going to do it. So that's a total of, what, 26 different Instagram reels that you're going to be doing. It can be all kinds. You can do ones that are produced. You can do edits of your sermon, kind of condensing those down, but commit to doing that. Don't skip any weeks, don't have plans. If you have a week where you're going to be traveling or something, do two the week before. Make sure that you have all of these things dialed in. And if we can be consistent, the results will come over time. The thing about Instagram reels and really all of these kind of discovery algorithm platforms and short form video platforms is that this is baffling to us as people that study this stuff, is that it's really hard to figure out what works and what doesn't to be able to really master that. We do videos sometimes that we think, well, that was a banger. Like, this video was good. This one's definitely going to kill it. And then a meme with a fish cricket, a fish in it, pushing up against a diver that we made a joke about. Sound people, sound guys at church that winds up getting 200,000 views on Instagram reels or something like that. [00:06:33] Speaker B: Right? [00:06:33] Speaker A: So we can't really come to the bottom. But here's what we have found, is that if you just do it consistently and you do it like, let's say 26 over six months, one a week, something like that, something will hit, something will wind up. It might not be the one that you think will hit. It probably won't in most cases. Sometimes we look at the ones that hit for a church and we're like, why on earth did that video do so well? What are we missing in this here? There's just so many parts to the algorithm that it is still kind of hard to decipher. But if you stay consistent, that is the best shortcut to results. If you want to call it a shortcut, it's not really, it's consistency and doing the hard work, kind of the tortoise and the hair situation. Do it well, do it consistently and you'll see results. [00:07:16] Speaker B: Yeah, no, that's good. And I think also, just not only for the algorithms and all of that, but just that's going to put it in front of people more often and people will be used to your content and keep engaging in it. So that's good. [00:07:29] Speaker A: Thomas, what's the next one is collaborate together. And I want to talk about two ways of collaborating. The obvious one for churches is that this shouldn't be done in a vacuum. You probably want people that have different tastes and styles and those things weighing in on, hey, this would make a really good reel. Or, hey, have we considered this kind of an idea? You'll probably have a variety of different kinds of reels, whether they be kind of condensed sermon clips. Maybe they're things that you actually produce. Maybe sometimes they're little fun skits. Maybe it's your worship team singing. Those kinds of things. They're all make for really good reels. If you could make them compelling but have other people weighing in on what's going to work, what isn't. The other way to think about collaborating is also collaborating with people that are maybe even like other churches in your area or other people that are in ministry or people that have, maybe especially if they have a larger audience than you on Instagram. It's a really cool opportunity. You can do a collaborative reel where you're saying that both of our channels are together doing this and that lets each of your organizations kind of leverage the other one's channel and you'll get a much wider audience in most cases. So look at some collaboration opportunities. [00:08:43] Speaker B: Yeah, that's good. Yeah. Churches are always about doing things as a team, and that allows for more other perspectives and creativity, like you said. And next one is analyze and adapt. And what do we mean by that? So Instagram provides analytics so you can track how your reels are performing and so views, comments and shares, and those types of things will obviously allow you to stay abreast as to what's working, what's not. And that's, I think what it'll help you do is to understand, okay, this is what's been working for us. Like you said, sometimes it's a surprise. Like it is to us at reachrite when we put out ours, that, oh, wow, this one performed and did that, but it'll let you know what people are liking and what's working. [00:09:29] Speaker A: Yeah, totally. I think that, again, this is tricky, like I was saying before, because you can analyze till you're blue in the face. You probably won't figure out the exact formula. And they want it that way. They want it so that you don't know exactly how to do things so that all videos will be exactly this one thing. There's things that we've picked up, like we've found here at Reachwrite, that 35 seconds is the perfect length of a video for us. So we get the best results when our videos are 35 seconds. So we try to shoot for around that. But that doesn't mean we have some videos that are 7 seconds. We have some that are 58 seconds, and we try to keep them all under a minute. But you'll want to look at those kinds of things. You'll want to look at some of the topics that seem to get the most interaction and views and those things. And you want to make the analytics and the things that you're seeing out there make them your friend. [00:10:22] Speaker B: Yeah, that's good. [00:10:23] Speaker A: Cool. Next one is maintain a uniform aesthetic. So what this means is you want, as much as possible to have every video that you put out there on Instagram reels to feel like it's a First Baptist church video, so that people kind of feel familiar with you when they see that same person or that same stage, or they see that same cover photo on there. Then it helps them to kind of feel familiar with you, and it would make them more likely to watch future videos that you put out there. So here at Reachwright, we have three people primarily that are in our short videos, me and you and David, our head video editor, he does some meme ones and some great skit kind of videos. He does more the humorous side of things, but doing that stuff. People are familiar with us, they've seen us. Chances are we've kind of built familiarity with people. And what this also leads to is success on the ground. So I can't tell you how many times I've heard from pastors that will just be living their life out there and dropping their kids off at school, and they'll run into another parent or something like that, and they'll say, hey, I feel like I've seen you somewhere before. I think I saw you on my Instagram feed or on reels there is that you? And it's a great conversation starter, and it's a way to kind of introduce your church to more people. So having that makes you feel famous helps. That's the main thing, is it makes you famous, makes you Internet. [00:11:52] Speaker B: No, actually, the thing I think this also is a good thing is it helps you build your brand. I mean, just like we recommend consistency with fonts and your logo and colors or colors on your website and all of that same thing, when there is this uniform aesthetic or consistency, another way to put it with that, it makes you more memorable. So I think that's a big thing too, is staying on brand, if you will, will make you more memorable and so on. So next one, embrace your hashtags. So it's so funny, I come across still people, the hashtags have been out for a while, actually. It took me a while to get these little guys down and understand their full value, I guess. But I guess we would say think of them as like little beacons guiding people to your reels. So if you're doing popular little hashtags that reflect your church's content, that kind of get the attention of others, it's going to lead more people to your reels. [00:12:57] Speaker A: Yeah, it's true. I think this is something that I still do it. So we still do it for churches. We encourage churches to use it still. It's waning in its importance. I don't think that it's as important as it used to be because the algorithms are smarter than that and people they've picked up that they don't want to just give free views to people just because they knew the most trending hashtag to put on their post or on their reel there. So I will say that it's waning in its importance, but I still do see it as working. So it's something that we still do it because I'd say the vast majority of time it doesn't do much. But we have one particular video that we did. It was like, it's kind of embarrassing because it was one of the first reels that we ever did. And it's about expository preaching. And this is one thing you'll find when you do reels or any kind of short form or any video content, is you look back to when you first started and you're like, oh, my gosh, that's like, I wish. What was I thinking? I think all of us feel that way on social media, right? When we think about some of our. [00:14:00] Speaker B: First podcasts, too, Thomas. [00:14:02] Speaker A: Absolutely. Our first podcast, it was very different. You think back to the things I used to post on Myspace or on Facebook. When I first. You think back, we used to really just know Thomas is catching the bus or something like that. When we would write that, that would be our post update. [00:14:20] Speaker B: Mine to come up from nine years ago. Oh, man, I'm leaving town. I'm going to sure miss my family. [00:14:25] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. So it's things that we don't, I don't know, we're just too cool to post that stuff. Everybody nowadays, right? [00:14:30] Speaker B: You'd be super lame now. We should restart that trend now. Go ahead. [00:14:34] Speaker A: I'm getting off lame posting. So here's the thing, is that sometimes when we use hashtags, they do tend to work. So I have this one that was about expository preaching. It's by no means our best video, but it is consistently like, even to this day, it's still getting a lot of traction on all of these short form platforms because we use the right hashtags and we search engine optimized it and did those things. And people happen to be searching for expository preaching. I think if you put expository preaching into YouTube, I know that's where it does best. And I think our short is like the third result on YouTube, and that leads to hundreds of views every single day on this video that we're really not that proud of. So it's something that it's not bad. It's not so bad that it hurts our brand. I wouldn't say, but I would wish that a different video would have been the one that really took off for us. But that's the way that it tends to go sometimes. All right, that's fun. So, hashtags, next one is short, sweet, impactful. I was getting into this a second ago, and I want to reemphasize this just because the limit on some of these platforms is 60 seconds or, I don't know, it changes all the time, and I imagine it will go up. I know, TikTok, you can do 30 minutes videos or maybe even hour long videos nowadays, but just because you can go that long, you almost certainly shouldn't. So don't look at kind of that rough 1 minute timeline that they all started at. Don't look at that and say, that's got to be our magic number, that everything is 59 seconds. You can do very good shorts that are 6 seconds long, and they're really just kind of a quick thought idea, a quick joke. I think memes are generally best when they're really short because a lot of times people will repeat, watch them. And that's something, that's a signal to the algorithms that this is a really good short or a really good reel, because it's something that people keep watching over and over again. So keep it short. I think that's the best advice. In general, you want to have no pauses and no real time. You want to pace it. So it's not just everything super fast all the time, but at the same time, you want to make sure that you're building towards something. Your hook leads towards something, and you don't waste anybody's time with it. Doesn't mean you have to talk fast, but just don't waste people's time. [00:16:55] Speaker B: That's good. Next one is engage and be social. We can't forget that even though these are shorts and they're shorter and a little bit different than a lot of other social media posting, it's still social media. It's a two way street. You still want to engage and respond to comments, ask questions, encourage participation with it. So, yeah, definitely don't forget that just because you're doing a short. It is still something that. Where you want to engage with people. [00:17:24] Speaker A: Yeah. The algorithm loves interaction, so anytime we can generate interaction on these things, when people leave comments, that's going to be our best bet. I mentioned that fish sound guy video. So weird that our best performing video of all time here, at least a number of views at reach, right, is a video of a giant fish and a scuba diver looking curiously at a clam that we made a meme about, right? So we have this one video, but we meticulously, up until it had something like 400 comments, we meticulously responded to every single one of those comments, and some of them were comments like, wow, datfish funny, or something like that. Right? Is all it said. And we would still send an emoji comment or something like that because we're building momentum on the interaction with people and people are going to. It's going to be more likely to show our reels to people if we've had a history of interacting with them. That's one of the key things that Instagram actually said recently, is that they found that they're going to show your reels more if you have a track record of interacting with this account, they take that to mean that you have a close relationship with them, and so it's going to lead them to be showing your reels to more people if you interact with them. So always a good thing to do. [00:18:37] Speaker B: That's good. [00:18:38] Speaker A: All right, next one is tap, humanize. Tap into. Tap into trends wisely is what we need to do wisely. So emphasis on the wisely because there's lots of trends. All of these different platforms, whether you're looking at TikTok or in this case, Instagram reels, you can see some of these things that are trending. Each one will have things like trending sounds, that kind of stuff. Don't be a person that just kind of thinks that any trend that's out there is a good one for my church to be on there are tons of inappropriate trends that you shouldn't be jumping on. But if it makes sense or you can make a meme or a joke out of it and it's something you want to do, don't be afraid to tap into some of those trending sounds. And the songs that are out there, those do tend to help you get a little bit more traction with some of your content. So our video editor, David, if you want to look at some of our reels out there, you can see some of the things that he does. A lot of them have to do with trending sounds. He'll turn them into a meme that's related to church content, some of those kinds of things. So, yeah, take a look at that if you're interested in some ideas on that. [00:19:44] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And the next one I really like is humanize your church. The word that comes to mind with this, too, is be authentic. You know what I mean by that? But also just show the human side of your church. It could be just internal stuff, like just reflections from small group members, volunteers, people laughing together, greeting one another. You don't need to always be glitzy or trendy like we were just talking about. So again, people value authenticity out there with any sort of marketing you do. And we're not just talking about marketing, but be human, be normal. And that helps you also stay in touch with people and keeps them engaged. [00:20:27] Speaker A: Yeah, good stuff. Last one is quality over quantity. This is something that we will always preach here at retrieve. You could certainly put out seven video scripture posts every single week and be just churning these things out. They're easy to make. You can even use AI. You take 500 of your favorite scriptures. And I've actually watched video tutorials where people do this with canva, there's a bulk upload and they produce like 500 different quote videos that you can pop onto these channels and things. And that's something to be said for that. You can churn those things out, but in the end, all of these things like you just talked about with humanizing yourself and making sure that people know you're real at your church there, all that comes back to this idea that we want something that is a quality, authentic experience. So that's why I wanted to come back to the point we started with, which I think is the most important. It's quality over quantity. The key is be consistent, but don't feel like you need to consistently be doing something that's overwhelming for you. Consistency of one or two a week is just fine. If that's all you could handle. I'd rather every church do two really good reels every week instead of doing one decent reel and six kind of crummy ones that don't get you anywhere and don't move the needle for you. So focus on quality. That's again, the big takeaway here. Consistent quality. That's what we're looking for, is consistent. So the way you kind of take your next step with this, my recommendation to you is ask yourself that question for the next six months. How many quality reels can we put out every single week? That's the magic number. If you want to get serious about this, commit to it, write it down, tell somebody else that you're going to do it, and then go for it. Start producing them and making them happen. In this episode, we've talked about some of these tips and tricks. If you're looking for some more of like the details on how we do it, who we mentioned before, David. He has done some fantastic videos here on the right channels on exactly how to do it, and he gives walkthroughs on how to do it on your phone through Capcut, how to do it on Adobe Premiere or other desktop software, some strategies on how to make them better and more engaging. We have a ton of really good content on how to make your reels, so we'll put a link to that down in the description. I hope you'll check it out. In the meantime, it would mean a lot to us if you would hit that like subscribe button, those kinds of things. Leave us a comment. Is your church using Instagram reels? We'd love to know how it's working for you. Have you had any bangers that have really gone off and seen thousands, if not tens or hundreds of thousands of views on them? Be interested to see what your experience has spent on that. So thanks guys, for being a part of the retrieve family, and we'll see you next week. [00:23:24] Speaker B: See ya.