Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Here's a question I've been asked many times. Should my church have separate social media profiles for each ministry, or is having just one primary social profile the best way to go for our entire church? In this episode, we're going to break down some of the pros and cons. Let's do this.
You're listening to the Reach, right? Podcast, the show dedicated to helping your church reach more people and pro.
Hey, guys, I'm Thomas.
[00:00:28] Speaker B: And I'm Ian.
[00:00:29] Speaker A: And today we're talking about social media profiles and whether your church should have separate profiles for ministries within your church. So most often we see this with churches that have maybe a separate Instagram account for their youth ministry or their kids ministry, or maybe Pinterest accounts for the Ladies ministry, some of those kinds of things. And we've been asked this question many times before, I guess, is that a good idea?
Should we have one social media profile for the church, or should we have each ministry in addition to the main church profiles? Should we have each ministry have their own profiles there? And so it's something we want to discuss and break down some of the ideas we have about that. So did I get that right, Ian?
[00:01:17] Speaker B: You do have it right. We get this question from time to time, and it's funny, it brought me back to the days when you and I first started in web development for churches where the same thing was said even before social media came onto the scene and was widely used by churches.
Do we need a separate website for our youth and kids ministries and all of these things? So we've seen this in other forms of marketing and not just social media or communication. And so, yeah, it's still very relevant. And yeah, it should be a helpful topic for a lot of ministry.
[00:01:49] Speaker A: I think it goes even back to this is really the core question of it is it's about branding for your church. That's another thing that we see, and this is something that I've seen churches get better at this, but I remember you and I have been doing this for 15 years now. But it's something where churches will often think that their subministry should. It'd be okay for them to have totally unique brands, unique logos, unique names, and not be really related to the church as a whole. So you see this with a church that's called New Song Church, and they have a youth ministry called Firehouse Fridays or something like that is the name of their youth ministry. That doesn't really fit in with the overall branding. It's totally different looking and I get it it comes from a good place. You want to give people that are leading these ministries the ability to be creative and build their own ministry up there. But in the end, and I think this is what we're going to arrive at with all of our discussion today, is that in the end, it's usually better to stay consistent with one brand, it's usually better with websites to stay consistent with one website. And when it comes to social media profiles, except for a few major, very rare exceptions, we're going to argue today that it is almost always better to have one social media profile on each of your different, each medium. So one Instagram account, one Facebook account, one TikTok account for your entire church. And we want to kind of discuss some of those reasons why here, right?
[00:03:20] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And why don't we dig into it? And I think you were already kind of alluding to this, but consistency in messaging is one of the benefits for keeping one social media approach, right?
[00:03:33] Speaker A: Yes, I think so. This is something that a lot of churches struggle with, and this goes back to that thing we were talking about with the websites and the branding, is that one of the things that if your kids ministry, your Youth ministry, your men's and Women's ministries, your seniors ministry, they all have their own Instagram accounts or Facebook accounts, what starts to happen, and not through any malice or anything like that, is just that people start to use different kinds of messaging and different kinds of language, and it becomes its own world and it becomes its own little ministry silo that doesn't lend itself well to the rest of the church community with those things. So we see this issue with messaging quite a bit. So, I don't know, maybe you could talk a little more about how we see it and ways that this manifests, Ian.
[00:04:18] Speaker B: Yeah, because I think it boils back to branding.
[00:04:21] Speaker A: Right.
[00:04:22] Speaker B: So having a consistent message and tone, that's one thing to say, tone. When someone's communicating on social media, each person's different.
[00:04:31] Speaker A: Right.
[00:04:31] Speaker B: So if you have all of these different people managing different social media accounts, they're going to communicate differently, they're going to have a style of communication that's a little bit different. And I think that that's what it does. It just kind of starts to take things in a different direction and off of one kind of single voice that you would have, so to speak. And again, I think that, like you said, there's no malice to it or anything. Not that churches are trying to make things convoluted, but it can just more easily happen compared to if you just have one channel, one voice with the same tone, keeping the communication consistent. And I think at the end of the day, the people that are following you on social media, when it's one tone, one voice, one consistent message, they're going to stay more engaged and there won't be confusion and those types of things that can arise.
[00:05:29] Speaker A: And let's get this out here, we probably should have led with this, but this is not an argument against posting content on a channel about these ministries. I think Youth ministry content, and you should have children's ministry, all these ministries are vitally important, and this should be on your one main church channel. It's just a matter of, it's easier to have that one consistent voice, consistent messaging, staying on brand when it is one group of people managing one account and not each ministry leading their own off onto different tangents. So that's the idea, yeah, absolutely.
[00:06:06] Speaker B: So, well, next one is resource management. Kind of a broad term there, but what are we thinking when it comes to this, Thomas?
[00:06:15] Speaker A: Well, really, this just comes down to the amount of manpower it takes to run social media. Well, we've very rarely run into churches that are killing it at social media on the whole, because it just takes such a huge investment, like literally, it takes a person probably to really do this well, it takes someone that's dedicated to doing it. And I find for most churches, you already have to pick and choose which kinds of accounts or which kinds of platforms you're going to be going on. Usually you're going to choose one, two, maybe three platforms you really focus on. But what happens is if you're managing multiple different accounts for different ministries, all you're doing is spreading that thin. So here's what I find is, generally speaking, churches don't have enough manpower to manage one channel well, and yet often they try to do six different channels for six different ministries and thinking that that in some way is easier to do or it's kind of working around some of the processes there. So in general, I think churches are going to be better off to just have one champion when it comes to social media. And that's not to say you're not taking input from other ministries, other leaders, they absolutely need to do that. They need to be getting content from them. But it already is hard enough to not have to manage different profiles for every different ministry. I think your other leaders would spend their time better focusing on other aspects of their ministry and letting the church primary social media accounts, letting those kind of speak for themselves on those. So there's probably some exceptions when it comes to things like Snapchat or maybe TikTok for youth ministries and those kinds of things. But by and large, I think you're better off having one champion running things or one group of people that are running one primary account.
[00:08:05] Speaker B: Totally agree. Totally agree. And I think even if you're a larger church, which again, we've mentioned so many times, I'm a part of a Larger church. As a matter of fact, my church does have a different Instagram for the youth ministry. And guess what? Even though I'm a part of a larger church that has a fairly large staff, there's been some miscommunication and some not saying burnout or anything by one person, but inconsistency in the frequency of. I know, for example, I have a teenage daughter and then I have a middle school son. Well, those events, we have a lot of events for our kids at their age, and there's been a lot of inconsistency as far as posts on certain channels going back and forth. I've seen it even at a well oiled larger church. And again, that's not to say, again, you said there's some exceptions for this, that any church can mess this up, big or small, but even though you may have more than one champion, that doesn't mean it's going to go well. So totally agree with that.
[00:09:06] Speaker A: I think that people in general, because social media is relatively new, it's not brand new anymore, but it was created in our relationship in the last 15 years. It didn't exist when you and I, it was just starting. When you and I met, we had MySpace. We did have MySpace.
[00:09:22] Speaker B: It's true.
[00:09:23] Speaker A: We did have it before that. But I think that we generally really underestimate the amount of work it takes to do that because everybody kind of projects social media as just something that we do naturally, or it just kind of happens because people want to engage. And that's how it started. Right when we first got onto Facebook, it wasn't work to try and do posts. We didn't think about it as much. That's why it was just, we'd write a sentence and post it, or we'd take a picture of our food on.
[00:09:54] Speaker B: My memories where it's just some sentence about, hey, I'm leaving town for a conference. Going to miss my wife and kids.
[00:10:00] Speaker A: Exactly. That's the kind of stuff we used to post, and it just doesn't cut the mustard anymore. And now the churches that are doing the best when it comes to social media, make no mistake, they have lots of people that are actually doing the work. I mean, in some cases, six or seven people that are full time employed at these very large churches that are just doing social media. Here at Reachwrite, even we're a very small company, but we have one person dedicated full time just to posting and commenting on social media. And there's several of us that at least part of our jobs is making content like this and creating video editing and doing all that work. So it is a huge undertaking to do this well. And so all that to say, you will not be able to do it well, especially as a small to medium sized church. If everybody is running in their own direction with stuff, you need to have a very tight plan that manages the limited resources we have to execute this well.
[00:10:59] Speaker B: Indeed. Yeah, absolutely. So, well said. There next one is audience engagement is where things can be hurt with multiple social media channels. So let's dig into this a little bit.
[00:11:10] Speaker A: Yeah, I think what we see with this is that, and you were kind of getting to this with the announcements and the confusion that's happening in your daughter's youth ministry social media accounts. That's what tends to happen. I think that, first, it's important to understand that social media today is different from what it was ten years ago, where the primary people that are going to be seeing your content don't necessarily follow you anymore, because all of the algorithms are more. They're focused on giving content to people that might be interested in what you're saying, not necessarily because they've followed you. So if you're using your social media channels the way we used to use them ten years ago, to do primarily updates for events and what's happening at the church, well, that's a huge mistake. Your reach is likely limited because of that, because you need to remember that most of the people, especially on some of these video platforms, like your Instagram reels, TikTok, YouTube shorts, Facebook reels, those channels, they're primarily showing you content that will interest you, not because you follow people. So with that in mind, we have to remember that the kind of content we're making is to drive engagement. And if we have multiple channels, what we're doing is we're fragmenting, we're breaking up our audience into lots of little chunks, and that's going to lead into different silos of people. And here's what tends to happen, is that, let's say you just finished a VBS this summer, right? So your church and you have a kids ministry Instagram account, you have a church Instagram account, a general church one, and then maybe you have a mom's Mothers of preschoolers Instagram account, too. All three of those channels are going to be posting some of the same photography from vacation Bible school, some similar updates. And what it's going to lead to is what Instagram will see is that, well, whenever we show this content, it's not getting as engaged as usual because chances are they saw it on some other account or they've already seen some of this stuff here. So it fragments out your audience and it actually hampers your reach in a lot of ways. So we think you could make some cases for it. I guess there are some instances where it might make sense, but by and large, for the vast majority of churches, this just adds to confusion and will get you less reach than just doing one account really well. And again, post the content from Kids Ministry, post the content from your youth ministry, but you don't need to have your separate account for that.
[00:13:35] Speaker B: Yeah, and I think all of that fragmentation can lead to people just stop following you altogether too. They just kind of check out. So we don't want that, especially if you've built up a following with your social media. And then also, too, with this as well, is that I know every church wants their congregation unified in more than one way.
[00:13:55] Speaker A: Right?
[00:13:55] Speaker B: That's biblical. So I think, too, that's one of the things, too. If we're not fragmenting and we're keeping everyone one message, again, one place, everyone's going to be more unified. There's going to be more interaction and engagement too on that one channel as wEll, because you don't have everyone split up and separated. So I think that's a good sub point under audience engagement.
[00:14:18] Speaker A: And what we want social media is by nature social. And if you have more people commenting on your content, that will lead to more interaction with more people. And we all know that there's challenges that churches have in having young people engage with adults in your church and vice versa. And what a great place to do that is on a social channel, because chances are that while adults may follow your youth accounts or your kids accounts, if their kids are involved with it, generally speaking, kids will not be following the main church account and there will be just kind of that disconnect happening there. So, yeah, you want to be careful to not fragment up your audience into multiple people because it leads to the last one. I guess I'll just kind of get going with that, is that it also leads to oversaturation. We want to avoid oversaturating people with the same kind of content. So if your youth ministry is going to be going to camp this summer, I'm sure that they'll be wanting to promote that, and they'll be posting every day about a camp opportunity to go to that, and they will be posting it on your main channel as well. And again, what tends to happen is it just saturates people with the same content over and over again that they don't need to be seeing every single time that they get onto social media there. So I think there's a risk of oversaturation when we do these kinds of things. You agree?
[00:15:37] Speaker B: Yeah, totally agree. Yeah, totally agree. And that was a good segue from what we were just talking about again. And people are, we're living in an age where, again, we're bombarded with just digital content. Right. It's coming at us all day long. So we want to keep everything clear and not clear, but simplified, I would say, is a good word for this.
[00:16:00] Speaker A: Yeah. I think the thing to remember, too, is that if you have more content to put out there, it's not a problem anymore to post more than one time a day. So let's say that you feel like you have a really good schedule for your main church channel where you're posting one post daily. It's not an issue to do a second post if there's really important new photos that just came out from Youth camp or there's new events that you want to make sure that get out there again. I think one of the keys to remember is that with our new discovery algorithm world that we live in is that most of the people that are seeing your content are not yet a part of your church. So keep that in mind with your social media. I think if you're really pushing for our youth ministry has to have their own account. A lot of times it's because you're thinking about social media in an older way, where it used to be more for updates of people that follow you. That's just not how it works anymore. Our social channels are different today, but we want to know what you think about this. Those are some of our thoughts on it. I suspect that there's much of our audience, like your church, Ian, that have multiple accounts for multiple ministries. And maybe we're missing some really big bonus that you feel like this really helps at your church. It's something that is going well for you guys. Let us know down in the comments if your church does have different profiles for different ministries and if it is working for you, I'd love to hear some of that. If you agree with us, let us know about that, too. It would mean a lot to us if you would rate, review, subscribe, do all those kinds of things on this podcast best. Thank you so much, guys, for being a part of the Reachwright family. And we'll see you next week.
[00:17:34] Speaker B: See you.
