Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Does your church use X or Twitter, as it used to be known? If not, it could be an opportunity that your church absolutely should consider. And in this conversation, we're going to break down ten tips that we see effective churches using on X. 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.
[00:00:28] Speaker B: And I'm Ian.
[00:00:29] Speaker A: And today we are talking about Twitter or X strategy for churches. And we have ten tips we'd like to share with our audience of things that we're seeing other churches use to get results on X. I think it should be a good conversation. I think before we get into it, I will say that I'm not going to put this out here. I do not think that X is a platform that every church should use. And it's probably the. A little bit further down the list. If I was ranking platforms today, I would probably say YouTube. If we're considering that a social media platform would be number one, Instagram is probably number two, Facebook, TikTok. And then probably, like, in fifth place, I would put X or Twitter.
There is a certain subset of churches. Let me just say this. I say all that as that is the social network that I use the most by a long shot. I'm on X, Twitter much more than any other platform. Personally, it is my favorite social media platform. So it's not some kind of a bias that I like TikTok or Instagram more. I actually really prefer X as a platform. I think it's the most useful to me just because of the way I'm wired. It's. I find that I learn much more on X. And, you know, that, you know, you call me mister questions, obviously, Ian. So, you know, that's something that's important to me. I'm always getting my questions answered on X. Maybe that's why you don't like it as much as I do.
[00:01:57] Speaker B: That's funny. Yeah, I was just thinking that while you were going through it, so. No, that's. No. And you asked very good questions all the time, Thomas, and you're a thinker, and. Yeah, I don't know if I just. I've never gotten into it. And I think, you know, when it came on the scene, before it morphed into x and all the changes we've seen, you know, Facebook, Washington was all the rage, and that's kind of where I was at. And now I've actually transitioned into probably almost 50 50 Instagram and Facebook. And I just never got into it. I did get an account. I did post a little bit here and there and I just, I didn't get into it now. I mean, I still learn in other areas, Thomas online, but do my homework there. But yeah, I just never got into it, to be honest. And I, you know, like you said at the beginning, we don't think it's best for, it has different uses, I think, compared to a lot of the other social media platforms. And we're going to get into what a church can do there. But you're right, it's not right for every church. And I will say, as we work with so many churches here, a lot, I see a lot fewer churches utilizing it these days. Instead, I think a lot of churches.
[00:03:11] Speaker A: Yeah, they'll have an account, but I can count on one hand the number of churches that we serve that are really effective on X, like that they have a really great presence there. A couple of reasons why. And I think it goes to the root of what X is for and how the platform works. Number one, I almost exclusively follow individual people on X. So while I said that there's very few churches that have a really great presence on X, I can think of lots of pastors and individuals and thinkers that I follow on X that I really get a lot out of. Like, I really appreciate following them. So, you know, great, great Bible thinkers, theologians, pastors, those are the kinds of people. So I think X is a better platform of all of them. I think it's much worse for brands than your Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube. Brands can work on those platforms. Individuals work so much better on X. I will say that it's actually probably better to be individual on those other platforms, too. But I just think you can get better results as a brand there than you can on X. And then on top of that, I think it's, there's the kind of content. When you do follow a brand, the only brands I really follow will be like news organizations and so on x, it makes sense for me because I'm getting constant, like, new updates on news items. That's the kind of place that I'm going to follow. Whereas churches, we don't really do that, right. We don't really put out a lot of news items, those kinds of things. There's not new theology updates or that kind of stuff that churches are doing.
So all that being said, I think that it is an uphill battle for a lot of churches. But we do have some tips. If your church does want to use x, you're thinking about it, I think it presents some really cool opportunities. And for churches that are willing to work it and actually do it, I think it actually holds a lot of opportunity for them. I think one of the things, and actually, we'll get into this here, but one of the differences is the posting frequency on x is you can actually post a lot more on x than you do on other platforms because the algorithm just works a little bit differently. We'll talk a little bit more about it as we go here. But should I start it off, Ian?
[00:05:25] Speaker B: Yeah, you should. And it's funny because you mentioned brands. That's our first point, so be a good segue into that.
[00:05:32] Speaker A: So, yeah, the first point we have is like, you have to keep consistent branding. And by branding we mean more than just having your logo icon and your background profile image, making those what they are, it depends on your church.
See, I'm open to the idea and I'm open to be convinced that it would make sense for a church account to actually be the pastor's account, uh, there. Like, so if you have a prominent pastor, um, it might make sense to like have his Twitter account or her Twitter account be the one that's actually going out there and the one, uh, that people follow and not having a church one, but kind of making that your church account. The, the rub there is that, you know, for all that, I think you'll get better results on Twitter if you have it as a personal brand.
I think that the issue is that it kind of elevates the pastor. And I think there's just a lot to be said about just the dangers involved with that. When a church becomes about a personality or an individual person and not about the collection of people in that community. I think it leads to all kinds of problems that we're seeing in the church right now. But for the most part, I think churches should have an individual brand, like, so the church's brand should be the one that's actually served on there. And when you do that, yes, have your logos and your colors and all those be consistent. But on top of that, your brand is also the way that you communicate. I recommend that every church have some kind of a style guide in the way that we write things. We're going to talk about things this way. We have one here at Reachwrite and we use certain words, we speak about things certain ways. We capitalize our name certain ways. Just like every news organization has a style guide and how they write about stuff. Same thing goes here and that goes to kind of keeping your brand consistent on there. So making it feel like it's from a person and the same person all the time. That's really what we're talking about when we talk about branding on x. Yeah.
[00:07:30] Speaker B: Consistency in branding is the rule for really anything you do online, so I don't have much to add there. I did. While we were talking about that, though, I had a question, Thomas, that you may know since you're there, when you mentioned a prominent pastor or something, the first one that came to mind was Stephen Furtick, elevation church. Do you know how they do it? Is he, do they, do they have both a church, Twitter or X account and then he has his own or.
[00:07:57] Speaker A: Yeah, he's not really prominent. I wouldn't say on x, nor is the church. I believe they have accounts for both. I think he has an account. I'm sure that it's managed by the social media staff there at elevation. And I think it's primarily, from what I've seen, it's just kind of sayings, you know, he's so famous for those amazing one liners that he has in his sermons and it's usually a lot of that kind of content, which is a little less organic, I think. And so that's why it's not something that shows up in my feed very often. I do get things from all kinds of prominent pastors, but, yeah, I don't see much of him on there.
[00:08:35] Speaker B: Yeah, good. Yeah, I was curious. So, well, next one is also something that we recommend for every social media channel is post regular, regularly. And based on what you were saying, Thomas, and your experience with it, would you say that posting regularly is even more important on Twitter, like, compared to maybe Facebook?
[00:08:56] Speaker A: Yeah, I think so.
I think regularly is. So I think it's equally important that you post consistently, like, so that you pick a schedule and you stick with it. So I don't think there's any difference there. I think on Facebook it's probably like one a day is the max on Instagram, one a day as the max. I think the difference with regularly for X or Twitter is that it is, it can be much more in volume. I think three or four times a day is a possibility and it will lead to better results if you can put out quality statements a few times per day. So I think most churches, you ought to kind of choose a rhythm and just go with it. On Twitter, there's something called threads where you can have one tweet that's followed by multiple other kind of sub tweets to tell a longer story. Those are really something that performs well on Twitter. So a lot of people, maybe you come up with a strategy where we're going to post two individual tweets a day, and then three times a week we're going to post a thread, which is a series of different tweets on a specific theme or a theological topic or a passage of the Bible, whatever it would wind up being. So there's some cool ways to do this if you wanted to. Maybe you have a sermon that you put onto YouTube. You can actually get a lot of help from tools like chat, GPT, to actually take the transcript of your sermon and load it in and say, help me turn this into a thread that will go viral on Twitter, and it can kind of help you craft one. I don't think it'll ever be perfect and actually get it exactly right and get your nuances correctly, but I think it gives you a good starting point on these kinds of things. But that's a tool we can use. That's a little off the point there, but, yeah, being regular is important.
[00:10:44] Speaker B: There you go.
[00:10:45] Speaker A: Awesome. Next one is use hashtags. And I have been saying this a lot lately in our conversations. When I say use hashtags, I actually mean almost never use hashtags. So it's something that is. It's old advice. Here's the thing. Twitter is the one that invented hashtags, right? That they came, as far as I know, maybe it was something that was floating around out there. But before discord and before Instagram or any of those things, there was Twitter, and you used hashtags. And it was a really cool tool for a while for you to be able to get your content discovered more often. Because if people take a look at it and they typed in a specific hashtag that they're interested in, uh, you could just put it in there. And if you ever use that hashtag, you're always going to show up. The algorithm is much smarter now. Uh, and Elon Musk, when he bought Twitter, he famously released all of the code, and he said, hey, here's everything you need to know about it. Here's how we're ranking things. And in there, we actually discovered that if you ever used more than one hashtag, it was a severe, uh, sign that to not promote your post. So the people that invented hashtags actually wrote code that said, if you use hashtags, show it to fewer people. That's where it came from. So, interesting. I can think of one good reason to use hashtags, is if you want to do, like, a collection of images as a church and you want to invite people, maybe you have a big anniversary celebration, and so you make a hashtag that is new hope 23 or something like that, for your birthday, whatever it would be, and it's a hashtag for that. And then anybody that takes pictures at your big anniversary event, they could then use that hashtag and you get to aggregate all that content. It's kind of neat to do it that way. But, you know, honestly, I would almost completely steer clear of hashtags unless you have a very specific reason. If your reason is because it'll reach more people, it's just not true anymore. So that's kind of five year old knowledge at this point.
[00:12:49] Speaker B: Yeah, that's good. Next one is engage with followers. So obviously, we say this again with all social media, it's a little different, right, with Twitter. And I think it's maybe even, from what I've learned, a little more important, especially if you're following a lot of influential names out there and everything. So retweeting their tweets, if you will, shows that obviously you care about their content and shows that you're engaged. Since this is a more informative social media outlet, as we've said, where you learn, maybe it's a little more important to engage there, right?
[00:13:30] Speaker A: Yeah, I think so. But this is really where it struggles. It's hard to be a brand account, right? Cause like, think about it in like a non church setting, let's say, like, if your local, you know, the guy you use for plumbing, if he had a Twitter account like that was called ABC plumbing or something like that, and they're commenting on things. Nobody really. It's hard to engage with a non human entity like a plumber or a restaurant or in this case, a church. I think it's a little easier, I guess, as a church because people understand that there's a collection of people, is what it is. It's a group of people that have a similar cause, believe and worship Jesus Christ. But all that being said, I just think this is one of the big challenges.
But it still does help if you are doing everything you can to engage. Absolutely. If anybody ever comments on your church content, do respond, do give them hearts when they do that. You know, do that kind of stuff that you do to kind of engage with people. Yeah, but just know you're fighting an uphill battle as a brand as opposed to a person. Because when someone goes back and forth with me, it can be like a real conversation. It's hard to start those conversations as a church, I'd say, yeah, that's good. All right, next one up is promote events. This is an obvious one. I think that it could be a useful tool to do that. It's not something, again, it's not a big conversation starter. So I don't know that you're. It's really hard to go viral with event posts on Twitter. It's just not what the platform is made for. It's made for conversations. But if you have questions about events, or maybe you wanna do a survey before your event to kinda see what other churches are doing or what people are looking for in an event, you know, maybe you're having a big Halloween or harvest party and you wanna know, hey, is it okay for a church to call it a Halloween party or should we call it a harvest party? That might be something that sparks conversation. So good conversations to be having on there. But I think as far as an event promoting tool, it's challenging. It's not really what the platform's made for, but it is something that a lot of churches do try to do. You could do it sparingly, I'd say.
[00:15:40] Speaker B: Okay, good point there. So next one's post visual content. Now, first thing that came to mind is, I know that x is not as visual as, say, Instagram, but what would you say is good visual content for a church? I mean, obviously we think of sermon series images. We think of maybe, yeah, just something from an outreach or something. What do you, what do you think is a good use of visual content for churches here?
[00:16:09] Speaker A: Well, I think for most churches, you would probably be posting most of the things you're posting on other channels onto X as well. So I would say if you're doing YouTube shorts or TikToks or reels, there's no harm in putting that onto your ex account. I know this from Reachwrite. I'll say that we get some traction on there, but that is far and away our worst performing channel for reachwrite when it comes to our, when it comes to that content. Now they're trying to grow in this area. We started putting entire podcast episodes and full length videos onto our account. So there's really nothing stopping you from putting an entire sermon, the whole recorded sermon, onto X. I would also put the short form ones on there as well. And then things you're putting on Instagram. So if you're doing carousels on Instagram or photos from events, you can put those on as to X as well. Again, X is going to reward volume more than other channels. So there's nothing wrong with kind of more posts doing three or four. So you're probably looking for things to supplement your content all the time. So I would say for most churches repurposing all the content you're putting on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, shorts, and your whole sermons, all of it is fair game on X.
[00:17:28] Speaker B: Okay, that's good stuff.
[00:17:30] Speaker A: Good. Next one is share testimonies. I think this is probably one of the biggest opportunities is because X is more conversation and story driven. I think this is a really good place to go. These are the stories that we are best at telling within the church. So I would encourage every church to be using X as a platform to share testimonies. If you ever do video testimonies, they will do great on acts. That's a good kind of content. But even like written testimonies or, hey, you know, just kind of the way you might start, it's like, hey, I heard from a gal in our church this week and she told me, blank, that's a great. This is a great platform where you could actually still just type that out. It has to be short. People don't read novels typically on X unless there's a really good reason or it's like a yemenite, a confession or something like that. But it's a great place to. A great place to do that is kind of, I heard from so and so, or we famously have learned that our hooks, Ian, we talk about this when we do hooks for our videos. Like this guy hooks, they tend to work well, right? So this guy stopped me down the hall and said, yeah, so those tend to do well on Twitter as well.
[00:18:43] Speaker B: Yeah, that's funny. That's good. The next one, we say quite a bit, collaborate with others, I guess, connecting with other like minded organizations or leaders, you know, making those connections. Obviously something we said retweeting, obviously. But, you know, for churches, we've often thought of, you know, if it's a church, they may want to collaborate with a local food pantry that the church doesn't have themselves, or if they did a joint outreach or something with another church or, you know, or just another resource that a church would provide.
[00:19:21] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:19:21] Speaker B: Somewhere in that vein. Is that right, Thomas? Just making those types of connections?
[00:19:26] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that. And then just like having a outbound strategy for Twitter, too. And again, this is really a disadvantage for organizations because organizations don't have, like, it's hard to make them have a voice, but there are a few out there, like we. I know, Wendy's is a famous one on X that they are really snarky with their responses. They'll make fun of, they'll make fun of Burger King or IHOP or those places in their stuff. So, yeah, they'll, they'll do that kind of stuff and people will write complaints even sometimes, and they'll just kind of, you know, they'll just kind of be dismissive, which is kind of nuts in this corporate world where they'll just be like, maybe you should try Burger King. You might like that better or something. That's the kind of stuff that they'll say on there. So there's a place for it. You can do it. But again, it's much easier to collaborate as an individual than it is as a brand. And it is, you need to have an outbound strategy where you're reaching out. And maybe if a local food pantry is on X that you're commenting and you're sharing your pictures on them, you make their platform better and by proxy it'll increase your reach on yours. So that's kind of what we think of when we think of engaging with other people and collaborating with others. That's good. Next one is scheduling your tweets. This is something that I think is really important, is using some kind of a scheduler because Twitter does reward volume, but it doesn't make, you can't just post a tweet every two minutes and do my three for the day. You probably want to space them out a little bit and have them a couple of hours apart and be broader in your coverage that way. So we really recommend using a tweet scheduler. I know here we use Vista social, but I also have experience with buffer and hootsuite. There's lots of different platforms out there you can use to schedule tweets. That's just a few of them, though. Yeah.
[00:21:21] Speaker B: And that's good, I think, especially because what we've said, that you're rewarded for more tweets, more frequent posts. And so that's why scheduling makes a lot of sense there, too. So last but not least is monitor analytics. We always end with some sort of a, we're tracking results, some sort of a call to action. Again, just like we say with everything, if you're doing it, you definitely want to measure the results, see what's working so, you know, understand which kind of tweets are, you know, getting you results compared to others. Yeah. And tracking that type of things, you know, see which, what time of the day is maybe working well for you those types of things, and I'm sure there's a lot more in there, too.
[00:22:05] Speaker A: So, yeah, I mean, so really what it comes down to is which tweets are reaching the most people. I don't know if they're still called tweets or not, if they're called exes.
[00:22:15] Speaker B: Or what do you. When I said tweets, I was thinking of that, you know, everyone keeps. I think there we're in that time when everyone keeps saying Twitter or X, they say both. Right. So, yeah, it's just.
[00:22:25] Speaker A: It's so hard. It is. It's like a big. So many different things. Yeah. Yeah. So I would say that when it comes to monitoring, the main thing you're looking for is reach, and you want to just continue to produce more of the kinds of content that's getting more reach as long as it serves your purpose. So, you know, I'm sure you could post things that have nothing to do with expanding and growing the gospel that gets a lot of reach. But, you know, we have a specific mission and if we can produce content that's getting a lot of reach, then we want to double down on those kinds of things. So when we talk about looking at analytics, I think a quick practice is to take a look at your last 30 days of posts and look at the five things that had the highest reach and see what do those things have in common. What do we do that work well there? Let's make more of that kind of content. That's the answer to that. So do that and I think you'll be well on your way. And stop doing the things that don't get any reach. So if you find that you used four hashtags and it didn't get any reach, well, they actually tell you that's going to be the case, and so stop doing that and make the necessary adjustments.
[00:23:32] Speaker B: Yeah, that's good stuff. Nothing much to add. Again, we started by saying we don't think this is the right platform for a lot of churches, but maybe through this it encouraged someone to start using X or Twitter.
[00:23:48] Speaker A: I don't want to be negative on it because I think it presents a great opportunity. And I see some churches specifically, when they're open to having their pastor, brand pastors, pastor being their brand.
They do phenomenal on X. Like, it's the results. And the reach, I think, are almost unmatched with the ability. In fact, I wish for reach, right, that I personally was on there better and was able to dedicate the time to, you know, really dive in and dig deep in X because I think it could lead to lots of great conversations and relationships and I expanding our brand, it's something that's kind of on our agenda. So I'm 100% for it. But I think it's probably the one that'll take the most squeeze to get the juice out of it for most churches. So if you're willing to count the cost and go for it, as Jesus calls us to do, we think it's a good opportunity. And if that's you, I hope this episode has been helpful. And if it isn't you, I hope this episode has been helpful to talk you out of it and don't feel here's one thing I'll just say don't feel like just because it is a social network that you need to be on it, it's worse to be on a social network that you're not using. And your last post was from 2022 than to not be on it at all. So take it as permission or license. Or if maybe you're a communications director at your church and your pastor keeps telling you we gotta be on Twitter or X, you can use this as evidence, and I'll be your biggest backer to say, no, let's cool our jets a little bit. It may not be the best thing for us right now. So anyway, I hope it's been helpful for you. If it has. If you could leave us a comment down below, let us know if you have any questions on X or Twitter. The platform, if your church uses it and you have a lot of effect, it's being really effective for you. I'd love for you to drop your handle down in the comments wherever you're watching this here, and let us know what your actual Twitter handle is. I'd love to check it out. Reach, right? Will follow you if you do that. And yeah, be sure you're able to back it up, though, and it's going well for you guys.
[00:25:48] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:25:49] Speaker A: Anyway, thanks guys, for being a part of the reach. Write family and we'll see you next time.
[00:25:53] Speaker B: See ya.
