Maximizing Engagement: 5 Quick Church YouTube Shorts Strategies

[00:00:00] Speaker A: YouTube shorts is hands down one of the best opportunities for churches right now to reach more people and grow your audience online. And we unpack in this conversation five tips to help your church get the most out of YouTube shorts. 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. [00:00:27] Speaker B: And I'm Ian. [00:00:28] Speaker A: And today we are talking about YouTube shorts strategies for churches. And we're gonna try and give you five quick wins that'll help your church get better results on YouTube shorts. YouTube shorts is one of the best opportunities that churches have, I think, right now to reach more people. So many churches are already putting their sermons onto YouTube, and shorts is a way just for you to grow your audience and get some of those quick wins and reach a wider audience. So really, I can't think of a better opportunity for churches right now to reach a wider audience than YouTube shorts. Agreed, Ian? [00:01:06] Speaker B: Yeah, agreed. And you're right, it's right now, and these have been a thing for a while now, and churches have, a lot of churches we come across, they've definitely been making efforts in this area more and more have. But you're right, it's a right now thing. And if you want to engage people, like you said, grow your audience. But I think they're great for engagement as a key word for us to focus on, too. So. [00:01:29] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, they're great for an engagement. But I. So what we see here, so this is something that's part of our strategy at reach, right? It's part of our strategy at my church and everywhere that we, you know, everywhere we can. I think this is a winning strategy right now, is you can grow your audience, grow your subscribers on YouTube, and clear, easy way to do that is with shorts, because what shorts does is it actually is really a great tool to introduce your content to a new audience. So it's not just going to be seen by people that are members of your church, but the algorithm is smart enough that it'll start to present your content to people that have never heard of you before. Yeah, people that YouTube thinks would probably like your content. It'll make those decisions and get you in front of new audiences. So, huge opportunity. So I'll kind of kick us off. We have five different quick wins for you today. The first one is that you need to create captivating intros, or hooks, as these might be called. So I can't express, like, if there's one thing you take away from this this is the key is you need to create captivating hooks for your shorts to have success. So for some churches, you can often, like if you're doing repurposed sermon content, uh, that's a great strategy for this. So you take a, you know, 45 2nd clip of your sermon, uh, and you turn it into a short. Yeah. What's so important though, is that you have some kind of a hook. And here's what we found, is that that hook isn't always what naturally came right before the 45 seconds that you want to highlight in your sermon. There it maybe is some other part of the sermon, and sometimes it, it makes sense just to record a separate hook. So here's kind of a spoiler on how we do things here at reach. Right. You and I, Ian, we just finished recording hooks for this episode, right. So let's give them an example. Like, so what we did before we started this episode is we said, do you want to see your church grow on YouTube? Try this. Right, right. That's the kind of thing. Why don't you do one of the ones you did? Give us a chance. [00:03:27] Speaker B: Oh, goodness. I guess another one was. Yeah. Is your church utilizing YouTube shorts yet? If not, you're way behind, you know. [00:03:36] Speaker A: Something along those lines, those kind of things. And it's just, you know, kind of you're, you're, you're at peak energy and you're trying to do something that piques someone's interest to get them to watch the entire YouTube short. So. Yeah, yeah, and this is the same thing. This strategy works for TikTok. It works for Instagram and Facebook reels as well. But getting these hooks nailed, um, kind of think of them as like the first two or 3 seconds of your short. That's what's going to dictate whether someone's going to stick around and watch it. So there's all kinds of strategies on this, things that make for good hooks. Um, we, we kind of, it's hard for us in our area, but usually story is the best strategy when it comes to YouTube shorts. So we've found that like, actually the ones that perform best are when people start with phrases like this guy once told me or someone told me this week, just kind of those story introduction type hooks. Those work really well. Or peaking someone's interest with like a question that's maybe hard to answer and then you're going to give them the answer to that. So those are a couple strategies we see working. Anything to add on that, Ian, though, about how to do kind of the intros and make those work. [00:04:45] Speaker B: Well, just the strategy with this has been around for a long time. It's funny, even before shorts were a thing on social media and on YouTube, it reminded me of the public speaking class that I took in college, which talked about how you want to start with an attention getter to your speech and something that engages people right then to get their attention. Same thing if you're delivering a speech. Of course, for these, it's important because they are short. People are on the Internet, they're rushing and all of that, so. But, you know, the one thing that remains timeless is getting someone's attention and getting them in engage right off the bat. So. [00:05:24] Speaker A: But one of these days, we're gonna. This is one of my favorite parts, I think, of doing our. Our podcast together is it's always kind of funny. You and I are just ad libbing and yeah, we probably shoot about, I don't know, ten to 15 of those intros every single week. And we use two or three of them on our actual, actual YouTube shorts. But there are so many outtakes. Maybe someday our editing team will put together a video of all the bloopers ridiculous things that we said. I don't know if they'd take it seriously anymore as church marketing gurus, if they saw the funny things that come out of that. But anyway, it's always one of our favorite things. [00:05:59] Speaker B: It takes a little work is the point there, right? It takes a little. You got to run through it a few times. So. But, well, good. That's a good segue as far as storytelling to this next one. It's to utilize visual storytelling. Again, these are short. Part of what's engaged is not just the. What engages people is not just the hook, but visual storytelling. So making sure that they're standing out visually. So, you know, you want to make sure that you use bright colors, that there's animations, that there's engaging text and fonts and those things that. That come into the short. Again, it's. It's keeping people engaged. Storytelling is something we talk a lot about, not just with shorts, but just with branding and marketing in general. But particularly for shorts, visual storytelling is something that keeps people engaged and following the short all the way through. [00:06:54] Speaker A: Yep, that's it. So when it comes to visual storytelling, I would encourage you, even if you're using repurposed sermons, try to a few times, like, or try different ways to insert B roll footage into there because I think you can actually up the engagement and, like, kind of the interest that people have if you have little segments where it's not just a talking head or just, you know, like us, a lot of times it's just us looking at the camera. But you'll usually see when our shorts are edited, if this is someday turned into a short here, that we usually have some kind of b roll to increase the engagement and kind of help people engage with the content a little better. So look at those kinds of things. B roll footage from your church is always best, but there's all kinds of stock B roll footage sites out there, and you can usually find even things that are free that can probably go along with whatever story you're telling in your short there. So that's it. Good advice there. Next one is follow trends. All of these sites, all the reels and short form content, TikToks and YouTube shorts, all of them have some value to being on trend and certain things that are working. So right now, as we're recording this, everything is on YouTube shorts is people doing the Beyonce country dance. I see that left and right everywhere I look on these things. Have you seen that, Ian? [00:08:14] Speaker B: Yeah, I have. Yeah. [00:08:15] Speaker A: You sound very excited about that. That's good. [00:08:17] Speaker B: I've heard about it. Yeah. [00:08:18] Speaker A: You've heard about it? Yes. I'm in Texas. [00:08:20] Speaker B: I'm all for you. [00:08:21] Speaker A: And Megan didn't record one. You guys didn't make a Beyonce dance of you two together? We didn't. [00:08:25] Speaker B: We didn't. We're lame. It would have been. It would have given our kids something to make fun of us for. For sure. So. [00:08:31] Speaker A: Yeah. And then there's this other one, you see where it's like, I don't even know what the song is, but it's this kind of this song where people go back and forth and pretend to fight and do this fight to the music thing. I see this trend happening right now. This will be totally irrelevant if you're watching this a few weeks later because these trends change every few days. But this is just what I've been seeing this week as I've been digging into our shorts account. But these are the kind of things that, when it makes sense, it's smart for churches to hop onto it. So I'm not saying that your pastors all do the Beyonce dance for this ain't Texas or whatever that song is there that probably, maybe you can find a reason to do it. I don't know. But this isn't a call to, hey, whatever is the trend of the week, jump on it and you have to hit it. We're not saying that at all. But when it makes sense, there is definitely value in finding trends that you can run with. Right? So yeah, take that for what it's worth. Keep an eye on the trends. Don't stretch yourself to get outside of who you are to follow whatever the latest trends are. When it makes sense, go for it. [00:09:35] Speaker B: Yeah, and it's just like you said, be aware. You don't want to do something that's out of date either. You might accidentally do something that was trending a year ago, you know, and then that'll kind of make you come off as not relevant. So for sure. Yeah, be aware. And it keeps you also relevant for sure. So next one is maintain consistent branding. This is something that, again, with all church marketing, you should do, but it carries over to shorts as well. You don't even know. We've talked about visual effects and visual storytelling. The tendency, or the temptation could be to get off brand and use some crazy varying fonts that don't match with your church's logo and branding and what you're already doing. This doesn't say you can't vary a little bit and of course, use some different visuals and colors and everything, but you don't want, want to veer too far from your actual brand. I would say don't veer from your brand, really at all. And you could still get creative and mix it up if you don't do that. But yeah, make sure you're keeping that consistent brand because these make you memorable. Just like we've talked about what we do here for reach, right, our logo, our colors and those things are always going to be a part of what we're doing because it makes you memorable. And we've always said this, when it comes to logo design and things that we've helped churches with in the past, when it comes to branding, is that, hey, it's not something that, you know, if someone sees these things, it's going to make them visit your church right away. But when they are looking for a church, because you're memorable and in their mind's eye and you've been out there for a while, it makes you memorable when that time comes that they're looking to find a new church locally. [00:11:25] Speaker A: Yeah, this is really church marketing 101. We've done multiple episodes about church branding and why it matters and why it's important. I think it's additionally important when it comes to short form video content because frankly, nobody, they're not paying as much attention to you as we think that they might be. And so it probably takes dozens of interactions with our content in order for someone to start to become familiar with us. And the way that we help that is by using consistent branding. If we are always looking totally different and in different locations with different fonts and different logos, we're using all these different colors and all that stuff is different. I think it just kind of ups the amount of time it takes for someone to or take for you to become memorable, let's say. So that's what it's all about is helping to think of you as a person that they trust or a ministry that they trust in this case. And the way that we can do that and we can build trust and make someone, you know, kind of think of you and maybe pay even more attention to your future videos is by kind of upping that branding and being really consistent in those areas. So something to take seriously, for sure. [00:12:41] Speaker B: Absolutely. [00:12:42] Speaker A: Good. Last one is engage your community. I can't stress this one enough either. Having, having engagement, there's a lot of reasons for this, but like that is one of the biggest signals to the algorithm. So YouTube looks for when there is engagement in the community, meaning like comments are being written, comments are being replied to. When that happens, that is a signal that this is an active channel that is worthy of more promotion within the algorithm. So if you. I would make content that elicits a response. That's one step you can take is ask questions in your shorts. Ask people what they think, ask them to write it down in the comments. That's always a good idea. Now if you're repurposing sermon content, you, you'd have to make something after the fact because it'd be weird on Sunday morning to your in person audience to say, let me know in the comments what you think. Right. Yeah. So, but if you are able to get that in and ask for comments, I think that's engaging the community. But here's the rule is that if you get a comment of any kind, positive, negative, if it's inappropriate, delete it. But any other kind of comment, always, always, always respond. Even if it's just someone, you know, doing three fire emojis, give them emojis right back. [00:14:00] Speaker B: Yeah, that's right. [00:14:01] Speaker A: These kinds of things, they're, they're the biggest signal to the algorithm that this is a creator that's engaging with his audience or her audience and it's something that they will want to promote your content even more when you do this. So, yeah, really big part of the strategy. [00:14:15] Speaker B: No, that's good that you touch on that nothing much to add there other than when you do those things again, you're already putting in the work to do these shorts. And if you're implementing these strategies we're talking about, you want it to be seen and to understand that the algorithms are looking for that engagement. So that's what we said was the key word at the beginning of the podcast, was engagement. So that's what we want with all of this. [00:14:40] Speaker A: Speaking of engagement, I'd love to engage with you, our audience. So if you guys are doing something on YouTube shorts that's working, let us know down in the comments. We want to make this a resource to share with lots of other pastors. And, you know, maybe there's something you're working, that's working for you, and you can share some of the wealth with the rest of our community. That would be much appreciated. If it's not working for you, let us know what the challenges are. We will respond to your comments as well. That's the way we do things here. So thanks so much, guys, for being a part of the Reach Rite family, and we'll see you next week. See ya.