Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 We talked to churches all the time that are really struggling to build a social media strategy. A lot of times they just have a social media hope or a social media wish for their church. Well, in today's episode, we want to help your church build a social media strategy from scratch. That'll get results. We hope this conversation helps your church reach more people and grow. This is the retried podcast.
Speaker 1 00:00:33 You listening to the read-write 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 your church see more visitors and grow.
Speaker 0 00:01:01 Hey guys, welcome to the retried podcast. Episode number 59. I am your host Thomas Costello. And with me as always is my cohost Ian Hyatt. What's up Thomas. Hey, not too much, man. Excited for our conversation here today. We're going to be talking about how your church or how a church can build a social media strategy from scratch, how to build one out. This is something that I think is really important for churches right now, because I don't know, we've talked to so many churches over the years that we all get the importance of social media and why we're using it. And we know that it's something we probably ought to be using, but we really don't have like a overall kind of strategy on where we're going. It reminds me of a saying we used to have is that we want to be strategic and not tactical. Right? We're focused on tactics and a lot of ways that not on strategy tactics, meaning we're trying to win battles, but not with the entire war. And so I think if you take a step back and look at it, I think there's a lot that we can, a lot of churches can grow if we start thinking and creating an actual strategy for our social social media accounts. And, uh, yeah. That's what we hope to uncover today.
Speaker 2 00:02:11 Yeah. And I think it's, you know, someone out there listening might think, well from scratch, haven't churches just been doing social media for a while now. And I think that's true. I think most churches have at least been doing something on social media, but probably not doing it well, like you said, don't have a strategy for it. And so it might be good to just start from the ground up. Like as, even if you're doing social media start as if you were never doing it, you know, just kind of started ground zero, just almost like when a church restarts. Right. Totally. So, yeah, I think great topic.
Speaker 0 00:02:44 I, I think we should put our audience at ease with this too. If you feel like you are trying to, you've been struggling with social media or it's been kind of hit or miss, and you haven't really ever seen results on this kind of stuff. You're the normal, like, that's something that is what most churches are in. We talked to churches, you and I all the time. And that's basically what we hear from everybody is that they, they are on social platforms, but they don't really have a strategy. They don't really have something that's, uh, you know, written down. I think that's one of the key things too, is that it's probably not a strategy until it's written down. Like, so I think that this is something that if you're not writing this, uh, this down and have some kind of a written thing, even with yourself, that you're some kind of a standard plan you're gonna hold yourself to, and you're probably not going to hit it.
Speaker 0 00:03:30 So your strategy can't be, we want to use social media or we want to engage with more people. That's not a strategy. Those are kind of like goals that you'd want to have, or are wishes maybe would be a better way. This is what we wish for our social media. But I think what we want to give people today is some, I think there's six concrete things to do, uh, to kind of build your social media strategy around. And I think if you do these things and at least give you something that you're going to commit to and something to measure yourself by, I think that's what really is important with this here. So I think you're going to start us off today though. Right? You're going to tackle the first
Speaker 2 00:04:08 One. Let me do so, and this is a good one here. First thing is you've got to recruit a champion. So who's that going to be? That main person that is going to be doing your social media, be upgrading know, put some good thought into this. You know, this is probably someone that should be definitely somewhat tech savvy. You know, someone that has experience with social media, someone it uses it, it might be easy. A lot of pastors know that there's always that one, that's maybe commenting on your social media and doing more with it already. Maybe, maybe they're not managing it for you, but they're the person that's always raw and making comments on Facebook or, or whatever, and liking all of your stuff. So, but I think he want to put some thought into this and find someone that's also, well, you could talk a little bit more about this, but you got to set expectations with this person and make sure they follow through, right?
Speaker 0 00:05:03 Yeah. I think the thing that most people mistake on this is that the biggest mistake I see is that they'll, they'll look for someone who is technically skilled. You know, someone usually it's someone that's young or something like that. Yeah. But really I think that someone who is, who is committed and someone who is willing to like actually do the tasks that we're going to outline in this conversation here today, what I've seen so many churches do is they'll, they'll make a couple of mistakes with this as they'll recruit a social media team, but there's not really a leader of the team or the leader of the team is the pastor who really isn't going to be involved in actually doing any of the posting or anything like that. So that's a mistake. We see a lot, but really what you're looking for is someone, yes, technical still isn't skill is important, but someone who you are able to hold accountable to do the things that actually need to be done.
Speaker 0 00:05:54 Here's, here's what I think we miss. Lot of times is that social media. Well, a lot of people, most of us use it for fun or for entertainment, for a church it's going to be work like actually producing content. It's a job. It is actual responsibility. Just the same way that leading worship is a responsibility. Is it, is it something that's fulfilling? Absolutely. Uh, but you know, leading worships, a responsibility, preaching sermons, that's a responsibility working in the sound booth and running the words and the presentation software. That's all, those are all jobs. There's fulfillment that comes from it. But if you don't hold this, you know, you don't have a standard set up for this, the job isn't going to be done the way that it needs to be done here. So really you're not just looking for the most technically gifted person, but the right person to be your champion is probably someone who has technical skill.
Speaker 0 00:06:47 And they're probably pretty social people. Like you're going to look for someone. Maybe they're not commenting on your posts all the time, but you notice on Instagram that they get way more likes than everybody else. Or they're on Facebook that everybody loves to comment on their stuff. And they're probably posting a lot already on their own channels. That's the kind of person you want, but it needs a side of accountability. That's, that's the main thing is that, uh, you're just gonna, it's not going to get done if it's not someone who you're going to be able to hold their feet to the fire, because again, the buck has to stop with someone, right? Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:07:20 And I like how you said, it's kind of considered a job and this doesn't mean you're going to have to pay someone to do this. Maybe you do. But I mean, looking at it as a job is a good thing. Cause it's not just someone that, like you said, you know, just, I mean, if you have someone that's just gonna, you know, they're doing social media, their technical shirt, they might post a little bit, but it may not be as often, or it may not be, you know, we'll dig into that a little bit too as we move on. But yeah, I think that's a key thing is, is to find that person and we've seen it also when you mentioned, it's not just that technical person, because we've seen this with web design too, over the years that you might have someone that knows how to set up a website, but they may not know anything about the marketing or the creative aspect of it. And then so you have something built, but there's no strategy to it or, or nothing creative to it at all. So that's a good
Speaker 0 00:08:14 Point. Yeah. It's funny to see a lot of those social skills that, that people have just naturally, like, I think this is weird to say, but a lot of times extroverts in, in real life, uh, are extroverts online as well. They're more willing to just kind of get out there and they have more interaction with people. So you probably want someone that's a little bit more, uh, in that realm there, but yeah, I think that the first step, I think in any social media strategy at the top of your paper, uh, where you're writing this stuff down, like we talked about, you want to write who is the champion, who is the person that the Buck's going to stop with them? Who can I, who can I talk to on a monthly basis? And who's going to give, like, be able to, to kind of take a look at how we're doing and if we're actually fulfilling strategy, uh, because it really is a job that you need to do.
Speaker 0 00:08:58 And yeah, I think you mentioned paying someone or not. Um, I think that you're right, you don't have to pay someone. There are probably people, if you're a smaller church, especially there probably are volunteers that can do this, but don't, don't um, like I, I think this is an important, uh, an important job in churches nowadays. Like this is something that really is right up there, right? It's, it's something that this is where people interact with your church throughout the week. There'll be on these channels more than any other place. So I think that it might be something, a lot of churches need to consider investing in someone here. Like, so if you don't have a communications person and I've already said on the record that I think communications person is the second most important job in every church. Yeah. So I think that you probably want to consider that, or at least if you're paying all kinds of other people in your church, this might be a role that you consider paying for, or, you know, some churches hire services to manage social media for them.
Speaker 0 00:09:56 They pay a lot of money for that. I mean, we're talking these services that do any kind of anything worth your while they're going to cost six, $700 a month as a starting point is how much it costs to do something like that. So, yeah, it's not, it's not free, it's real work. And so I know that's well said with that, but they kind of tackle, uh, number two, uh, is, uh, the second part of your social media strategy that you're building as you need to choose your platforms. And I think that there's lots of mistakes. I see churches make with this here is that they do one of two things is that they'll choose one platform and say, this is the platform that we're going to go for and that's it. Or I see them on the opposite extreme is they basically think that I've heard of this platform before, so we need to be on it.
Speaker 0 00:10:41 Like that's the other end of the spectrum with that. So I think that there are, there are lots of platforms that you could be choosing from, there are so many platforms that we don't even think about, um, you know, that, that are out there and they really are social. Uh, so churches can be on all kinds of them. So the answer of which platforms should you be on is probably somewhere in between the one and all of them. It's probably somewhere in between there. Um, I think the ones that every church should consider, uh, are going to be Facebook. Um, again, if you're going to be on one channel, that's the one to be on that's the first and primary, uh, second would be it's it's sister company or the same company, Instagram. It really is easy to be on both of those channels because they really share a lot of information.
Speaker 0 00:11:28 So if you have a, uh, an Instagram post it'll go on, you can make it go onto your Facebook account as well. Um, I think after that would probably be, uh, YouTube. I think people don't think about YouTube really as a social channel, but it absolutely is. I mean, there's interaction that happens socially. They're sharing. They like, they, it's basically a social channel for video only. So yeah, YouTube one that, especially if you're doing services every week, you should be doing, uh, thinking of it as a social media platform. Um, you know, probably not as social, but I think churches probably ought to take a look at their LinkedIn page. Um, you know, I think especially for, uh, professionals, I think it's a place to connect. Uh, and I think for a lot of your staff, it's a place that they relate to other people.
Speaker 0 00:12:15 So yeah, you ought to have one there and you probably ought to do something with it. Uh, and then Twitter, that's one of those ones that's kind of out there as a question mark for a lot of churches. I think if you're going to invest in a platform that is a great one to invest in, but it probably takes the most work to keep your Twitter platform up to date. Uh, Twitter is a platform that is good for multiple posts daily. So it's, it's something you really need to consider before you bite off. And now there's tons of other platforms that are out there. We're seeing more and more churches ask us about Tik, TOK, stag, chat, some of those kinds of things. And I think that they're all good, but don't feel like just because you've heard of them, you need to be investing in them. So what do you have to add to that
Speaker 2 00:12:59 Much? I mean, you covered a lot of the, you know, the platforms a church should use or consider, but yeah, I agree with that last statement. I mean, I think what is the saying that if your do too many things, you're no good at any one thing. So I think we've seen that we've seen churches, you know, what they, when they try and that it's a noble effort, you want to try to be as visible as you can, right? You want to reach different audiences that are on different social media platforms. That, that goal is, is a good noble goal to have. But most of the time, what we end up seeing is, you know, a few of these platforms, if you're doing like five or something like that, a few of them really suffer. They're not updated. You know, we've heard churches with Twitter with that, oh, well we have a Twitter, but I don't know if we've updated for two, three years
Speaker 0 00:13:41 Now or something like that. So,
Speaker 2 00:13:44 And then that can hurt you more than help you because if someone does come across you there and they don't see a post since 2018 or 17, well then it's going to make you look like you're not relevant or they're going to be like, I don't know if this church is still going or what. So, um, so I, I agree. I think you choose your, your battles so to speak or your platforms, and then try to do a good job at what you can manage and what makes sense for you to, I think that's another question is look at what makes sense for your cause. Different social media platforms will do different things. So you want to see which one is, is a good fit
Speaker 0 00:14:17 There's differences in each channel, like the demographics of each one. Um, you know, I think we, most of us probably know this, but you know, your tick talks and, um, and Snapchats, they're going to be, you know, all kinds of people are on those now, but you'll see a really heavy presence of gen Z on their Instagram is going to have lots of it's the millennial platform, right? So Instagram is going to have a lot of that Facebook it's it's for, uh, for gen Xers and boomers and people like that is kind of, you know,
Speaker 2 00:14:46 Portion of millennials still, but not as many as Instagram. Right.
Speaker 0 00:14:50 And I think, you know, Twitter kind of crosses the spectrum, but you'll have, it's usually for more educational kind of content. I would say everybody and their brother uses YouTube. And so it's a great channel that way. So think about that, think about who you're trying to reach, but I think what you need to weigh is every channel you add adds that much more work to your whole, uh, to managing your social media platform. So yeah, I think that most churches probably ought to choose, uh, somewhere between two and four platforms that they're using. Uh, and it's okay if you're not making Tik TOK videos six times a week, right? That's, that's not, uh, it's not the end of the world. If that's not who you're, what you're able to do. Because again, this takes more work. The more platforms you're on, the more you're investing in this.
Speaker 0 00:15:34 So, so choose your platforms wisely. Second thing on that list, when you're writing down your strategy, it's find your champion. And these are the platforms that we're going to really put our focus into and decide what those are that could change. You know, I imagine five years from now, there'll be a platform that we don't know about yet today that is out there and you'll be wanting to be on that possibly. But yeah, write it down, write out these are the platforms we're focusing on. These are the ones we're probably going to wait on and maybe keep our eye on, but have that drawn out. I think that'll help you.
Speaker 2 00:16:04 And then you want to find your frequency of how much you post on those. So that's our next one here is find your frequency. So I think that there's probably not like one right answer and formula for how often to post and share on social media, but there might be kind of a good at least do this, you know, kind of floor level to how many times you want to post. And I think it's probably going to be different from platform to platform. Don't you think? I mean, it's how often you should post on Facebook. I think what we've seen in found maybe at least once a day, at least on Facebook, maybe Instagram is like a few times a week and there's a lot of different reasons for this. And again, this is not like the, you know, the end all tried and trued formula or anything like that. Maybe it just gives you kind of at least a floor level to go from. And then of course there's across all these other platforms going to be a different frequency too. Yeah.
Speaker 0 00:17:02 Yeah. So I think I'll kind of give you my, uh, my guests on, uh, how, how often you should be posting on these different platforms. Uh, really what it comes down to, is it all things being equal? If there wasn't an algorithm you were working against, the more you post the better, but that's not really the case. It's not really the case that the more you post the better off it is, right? Because if that were the case, we would just be flooded with so many marketing messages on these things and that's the way it works. So there are right answers to that. So I'll kind of work our way from platform to platform from the ones that you should post the most to the ones where you post the least. Um, I think the ones that you should be posting the most, if you are on this platform is Twitter.
Speaker 0 00:17:46 Uh, Twitter has an algorithm that is very, uh, sequential and time-oriented, uh, so your posts on Twitter from three weeks ago have very little value, but it actually, you can get in front of a lot of eyes. If you're posting on Twitter regularly and having posted five times in a day, your sixth post, it doesn't really suffer because you've already posted that many times a day. So that's one of the things about Twitter. Now with Facebook, it's a little bit different where if you post five times a day, your reach will be diminished on each post. So it would be better for you to post one great post than having five pretty good posts in a particular day, because that great post will get a lot more attraction than all of your less good posts that way. So Facebook, our rule of thumb is about once a day.
Speaker 0 00:18:36 That's, that's about the right number. We've seen Instagram, uh, it's even tighter on that. Probably somewhere between three and five times a week. That's a really good frequency to post on a channel like Instagram, uh, Tik TOK is if you're on, they're probably pretty similar. Having a few a week is pretty normal on there. Uh, and then, uh, for platforms like YouTube, uh, LinkedIn, some of those, I think having your weekly message on YouTube, that makes a lot of sense, I think. And then maybe one other video, if you have one other video that you're making per week, if you are doing that kind of stuff. Yeah. I don't think you need to kill yourself to do that, but I think a weekly post on YouTube is just fine. So the reason for this again is not, again, all things being equal, the more the merrier, but you do start to suffer on some of these algorithms. If you're posting 10 posts a day on Facebook, I guess what I'm saying with this is it's not a good strategy to say that everything I'm posting on Twitter should automatically go onto Facebook, because what that does is it makes your one killer post a day. It actually diminishes, that's re that reach if you're just chiming in on little things on Twitter there. So that's kind of a way to think about that other than
Speaker 2 00:19:47 The algorithms too. I think you could just kind of annoy people if you post too much too. Right. So absolutely like I can't keep following this person. They're posting all day long.
Speaker 0 00:19:56 So at this person or this church. Yeah. The exact same thing. If you post seven scriptures every single day. Yeah. I think it'd be, I love the word as much as the next guy, but it probably isn't the best thing to put on your social media channel seven times a day. Yeah. That's it. Well, let me get the fourth one here. It's create a schedule. So to go along with that frequency, so if you're writing out your thing, you're going to say, we're going to post a, this often on each of these channels, that's going to be written down on your strategy. And then the next thing you'll do is you'll create a schedule of how we're going to post a, so what this means is it's creating some kind of a consistent pattern of when you post on these channels and what kind of content you post on these channels in your schedule.
Speaker 0 00:20:42 So we're going to be doing another podcast episode on this topic in next week. So stick around if this is something we're going to kind of talk through a proposed strategy or some ideas for how you could make a schedule. Uh, but what this looks like is, uh, if you're like saying on your Facebook account, cause that's the easiest one you're going to do one a day. Um, on Facebook, it's helpful if you come up with a strategy or a schedule that says on every single Sunday where you don't always post on Sunday afternoon, and we're going to post our message from the day, that's the sermon from Sunday morning, or maybe it takes you a day to edit it. So you're going to do it on Monday, whatever you would be posting on there, but that would always be the same day every single week.
Speaker 0 00:21:25 Uh, and then, uh, maybe, you know, you see things like throwback Thursday, right? Where you have some kind of a, a retro element in your schedule, in your posts that happens every Thursday and maybe you do scripture graphic Saturday, and you kind of dig into that there. So there's all kinds of ideas. The point here is, is that it will help you and your team if you know that we're going to post this many times per day or week. Uh, and then this is the kind of content that we're going to post on these days here. And it'll just help you kind of stay regular with those things. If you're managing seven posts a week on Facebook, 21 on Twitter, four on Instagram. And so you're probably talking about like 30 or 40 different posts having that kind of consistency. I find for most people, um, it really helps. And having that strategy written down is really big. What do you have to add to that? You
Speaker 2 00:22:16 Done much. I think you covered most of that, but I think also just, you know, people are going to, if you have that schedule, people are going to also expect certain content at a certain time. The people that are following you are going to know, okay. You know, I expect to get, you know, this scripture graphic or whatever it comes every Saturday. It gets me excited about church and drive before dinner or whatever. So let me check my phone or whatever, or if it is a devotional thing, scripture or something like that, that helps people in the morning or something you'd probably want to be consistent when they're getting up. And a lot of people are doing their devotion. So I think also think about the people following you and what times they might be expecting certain content.
Speaker 0 00:22:58 Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So we have a lot more to say about this. So we will, we'll kind of cut it short because we're going to dedicate an entire episode to this question next week. We want to give you guys, we have one for each day of the week, some ideas that you may want to incorporate into your schedule there. So come back next week, you can kind of dig into some of the, <inaudible> just a little loose teaser. That's exactly right. So hit number five for us. I will. So
Speaker 2 00:23:21 That's, your champion should be equipped with tools. So pick your tools and that's uh, yeah, that's something a lot of churches, when we mentioned social media tools, they can be using a lot of them are not aware of that. There's some great tools out there. There's tools for finding graphics there's tools for, for actually posting at a certain time when we were just talking about scheduling it and how often there's tools that will save you actually a lot of save your champion or team a lot of work. Um, so it's, it's really good to look at some of these. I know we're going to cover a few of those. You have some in mind for sure. And I know there's some we use here at reach. Right, right.
Speaker 0 00:24:02 Yeah, no, definitely. We do. So, you know, even as a, uh, oh, let's talk about a couple of kinds of tools. So yeah. I think you need some creative tools, uh, to make this job easier for people. And, um, you know, here we, we run a creative company. Uh, so we have designers on staff and, uh, we, you know, this is what we do day in and day out. So it's naturally easier for us, but we still use this tool for creativity. We use Canva all the time because really there's no easier way to turn out graphics for social media platforms than something like canvas. So I think that is a fantastic tool. It's probably worth the premium fee of $10 a month for most churches just to get that out there because it takes something that would take a, oh, I don't know, probably 20 or 30 minutes for a amateur level Photoshop person.
Speaker 0 00:24:52 It takes them maybe two minutes to do it. And they have some great templates in there already. Yeah. There's tons of good stuff. Canva is a great tool, uh, for both graphics. And even now they have a lot of video content on there, so you can make little video promos and those kinds of things. Awesome, awesome tool, uh, for making things. I think we see churches use it all the time for scripture graphics. Great for making those are quote graphics, some of those kinds of things. Uh, that's really a great tool there. Um, we can talk, uh, you'll, I'll probably talk a little bit more about the other kind of tool. So there's the creative side and then there's the actual technical or the posting side. And there's some really good tools out there for, uh, post automation and scheduling. Uh, that really is helpful.
Speaker 0 00:25:36 So, uh, the two big ones are called buffer and Hootsuite. Those are the two big ones when it comes to post scheduling. Uh, we here at reach, right? We use buffer, uh, primarily for, for our service. And I think probably most churches do that. But what it is, is it's basically buffer builds a queue of different things to post at different times. Uh, so what you can do with a tool like buffer is your champion can get in there and they can load up a schedule. They basically create a schedule that says kind of, we talked about before, how you have a schedule of things is that we're going to post every single day. And we're going to post at these times, buffer even has things that tells you the best times to post stuff. So it takes a look at your audience and when you get the most likes and comments and it knows to post at those times, and what it does is it basically creates a schedule where we say, we're going to post everyday on Facebook three times a day on Twitter, four times a week on Instagram and once a week on, on LinkedIn.
Speaker 0 00:26:37 And it basically lets you queue up all of those posts. So what it lets your person do and lets your champion get in there. And on Sunday afternoon, let's say they decide to work. Then they can spend two hours, right. Then getting all of the posts for the week, all dialed in, ready to go. Now I say all this with a word of caution is that ideally it is better I think, to post with the native posting platform on each one of these platforms here. So if you had the time to do it, I would prefer to post in Facebook natively or in Instagram natively because it lets you set some more tags and lets you, uh, just kind of dial in your post a little bit more. But I think for convenience sake, just to kind of get you over the hump here. Yeah. It probably makes sense for a lot of churches to look at a service like a buffer or like a hoot suite or one of those there. So what did it add to that?
Speaker 2 00:27:30 Well, if, if you're relying on a volunteer to, you know, one of the good things to mention to that, that person is that we've come up with a way for you to save some time, you know? And also because we understand that you have a life and all of that too and innocent B again, these are great tools. If you have someone that you pay on staff to do this too. Um, and yeah, I think, no, I think they're very smart, these tools. It's amazing. The things that you just outlined that you can do these days and they're also pretty affordable, aren't they,
Speaker 0 00:28:01 I think buffer is like 10 bucks a month. It might be 12 bucks a month. Now everything's going up with inflation and all that. But yeah, I think it's, it's not, and that's for, I think what we get is 10 accounts. So I can post on to 10 different social accounts in our buffer. Basically it has these posts that are ready to go onto all these accounts and you can do 10 different social channels if your, if your church is doing over 10 social channels. Yeah. Go ahead and go back to the beginning of this podcast and listen again, you probably need to cut back on some of those there. I think they have a free one to it. This might be outdated information, but uh, they, I believe they have one that is, uh, up to four channels that is free, but there's some pretty heavy limitations on those, on how many things you can get into your queue.
Speaker 0 00:28:47 Uh, some of that kind of stuff. Um, I want to mention one other one that we have tried before it's called Edgar meet edgar.com I think as an internet, um, this one is it has some similarities to buffer and Hootsuite, but it's more of a tool that you use to post old content. Uh, so I've seen some churches try this out for sermons, uh, where if they have sermons, uh, they can, they can set it up so that it'll go out there and it'll repost old content on a consistent basis. Uh, so let's say you have a, we talked last week about how to repurpose your old sermon catalog, right? Let's say you had 300 sermons loaded onto your site. Well, it can be on a schedule where every two days it basically takes one of those old sermons from your site and writes a post for you and post it onto social channels.
Speaker 0 00:29:39 And when it gets to the end, it just all over again and kind of recycles all of these. So, uh, kind of cool. I think that it, I don't know that it's um, I, I know we tried some of these kinds of tools with old blog posts, right? So we have hundreds and hundreds of blog posts. I found that after a while, it just became some of like almost spammy in some ways, if you're just posting that same old content, it's not great at writing interesting posts sometimes. So I have mixed feelings about it, but something maybe some churches should take a look at is, is meet Edgar. But yeah, these tools are really important, but, but I think when it comes to scheduling tools, you cannot have a social strategy where you think that I can work for two hours on Sunday and then not look at anything until the next Sunday, which brings us to number six.
Speaker 0 00:30:29 So number six is you need to build a response team. So in the beginning we talked about how you need to have a champion that is not to say you don't need a team to help you with social media at your church. And what this means is that when it comes to posting and getting posts out there, yeah, maybe one person can be kind of running the show with that. It's probably good to have the buck stop with one person. But when it comes to like the actually what makes social media social, you need to have a team around this. So it's important that you probably have a team of several people, really, a lot of ways, the more the merrier with this of people that are committed to when someone writes on one of your posts that they would get in there and comment and start a conversation, or when you put a new post out there that maybe asks a fun question, that they'll feel a responsibility to know that I want to get the conversation started. Right. I want to comment on these posts and hit like on these posts and follow up on that. So it is important to build a team around this. What do you have to add to that? Yeah. Oh, it's
Speaker 2 00:31:32 Just as important as you made me think of just, you know, the age old thing that's been happening at the local church level for years. And that's, if someone calls into your church and they have a need, they're going through a crisis or they need prayer and they need ministry or counseling or whatever, you're not going to just not call them back. So it's very similar. This is a ministry tool. This is a ministry that you're doing here with, with all this that we're talking about. So these people deserve to be followed up with. And how funny would it look if you're graded, posting all this content and everyone's following it, but you never respond. What would that say to the people following? Oh wow. This is just some sort of machine or something. It's not, it's not personal. So, uh, so obviously look at it the same way that you would. If someone came into your church with an issue or you met someone on the street or out at the grocery store that, that, you know, needed ministry or asked about your church, you're going to follow up and you're going to respond in the like, right.
Speaker 0 00:32:30 Yeah, absolutely. It's easy to get caught up in the idea that this is all, these are all numbers, right? Cause there's social media, but we've said this before on episodes, you have to, these are real people and they have real, uh, discipleship needs and challenges they're going through and prayer needs. And all these things are really happening in real life with real people. So really I think a lot of churches make this mistake in their strategy is they think of social media as just outbound marketing or it's just the way that they market their church. And if all you're doing is putting content out and you're not actually being social, that's what it is. You're just trying to do a, it's a marketing pitch. And so I think it has so much more potential. And that's why you need a team because you're not going to have someone to try as they might a champion, who's going to be able to be on-call 24 7, ready to go to respond to any message quickly on there.
Speaker 0 00:33:23 And it's too much to ask for one person and it's actually not social. It's just one person responding to everything on there. So having a team now, I want to be clear, this isn't necessarily all people that have your Facebook log-in or they have their Facebook managers. This team can have maybe you'll probably have a few different managers for instance. So if this is let's just use Facebook because people are most familiar with that, you'll probably have a few people that have first Baptist church, uh, log in information and their managers of your account. And they can comment on behalf of first Baptist church. You want to be really tight with that, right? You don't want 45 people being able to log in and comment as first Baptist because in that case, you really want to get the messaging. Exactly. Right? So you want people that are trained and you trust them on this stuff here.
Speaker 0 00:34:11 But this team is bigger than that. This team is people that are using their own social platforms. I think, to be able to comment and have interaction with people. And honestly, I think if someone puts some kind of like a, um, maybe you post a scripture graphic and someone who isn't a part of your church posts, Hey, this really meant a lot to me. Or thank you for sharing this with me. It will mean more to them. I think if someone from the community, if Joe Smith goes in there and comments on them and says, Hey, I want to know, you know, I'm praying for you. It'll be more to them. If that happens. Then if first Baptist church writes in and says, thank you for saying that we will pray for you. Right? So that's just more generic and having an individual person respond, that's important.
Speaker 0 00:34:55 So your response team is yes, it's for your church, but it's also encouraging them to on their personal accounts, be people that interact with you. And so you need to have a strategy and know who is on that response team and what is kind of their expectation. What do we want them to do? That's good. That's good stuff. Awesome. Yeah. And that's really it for, I think for today. I think if you do these six steps and again, I want to emphasize writing these things down are really important. If you don't have this written down of what your strategy is, you have a social media wish or a social media hope you don't have a social media strategy. And so I think getting these things written down who your champion is and how often we're going to post and what we're going to do and how we're going to respond to comments.
Speaker 0 00:35:39 You need to have all this stuff really formalized. I think that's the point when you cross over and you have a strategy. And I think that's when you're really going to start to get results on this here. So I hope this has been a helpful conversation. I know so many churches we talk to are struggling with these things here, because again, this is the most common response we get to tell us about your social media and how that's going for you guys is, oh, it's hit or miss or, oh, we're kind of struggling. Or, you know, we haven't posted in a while. And I think it's just a lack of strategy. A lot of times that churches are missing there. So hopefully this has been helpful if it has been for you guys. It would mean a lot to us if you've got social and, uh, would comment rate, review, subscribe, um, you know, really we'd love to answer any comments.
Speaker 0 00:36:21 If you have any questions on this here, or if you have any, if you're looking for any other ideas on this, we'd love to be social. Uh, we, uh, we'd love to kind of chime in and have a conversation with you on our social channels, wherever you're watching this, whether it's on Facebook or YouTube or on our website, or if you're listening to the podcast online there, but, uh, yeah, your interaction, it means a lot to us. We do this because we want to be a help to the church. So if it has been helpful, please let us know online. Thanks so much for tuning in guys and we hope to catch you next week. See ya.
Speaker 1 00:36:54 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 online at reach, right studios.com. If this episode has been helpful to you, it would mean the world to us. If you would rate, review and subscribe on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks again for listening. And we'll see you next week. <inaudible>.
