Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 If I had to choose just one opportunity for churches to take advantage of online, it would have to be YouTube shorts. Here's what your church needs to know. You are listening to the Reach Right podcast, the show dedicated to helping your church reach more people and grow. Hey guys, I'm Thomas.
Speaker 1 00:00:20 I'm Ian.
Speaker 0 00:00:21 And today we're talking about the best YouTube shorts strategy for churches. Should be a good conversation here. YouTube shorts, uh, has absolutely changed everything about YouTube and everything about social media. Uh, kind of following the lead from TikTok and Instagram reels, YouTube shorts is, uh, it's really making moves right now and I think it's here to stay. You agree, Ian?
Speaker 1 00:00:43 I think so. Yeah. It doesn't look like, uh, it, it is going anywhere. Uh, in least in the short term <laugh>.
Speaker 0 00:00:49 Yeah, no, in the short term emphasis on the short, so, yeah. Well, I, I think that, uh, just to, if you're new to this whole, uh, platform, uh, you probably have heard of TikTok and you've probably seen Instagram reels. That's kind of what Instagram has turned into, is a delivery for reels system. Uh, TikTok is the first one to market with the short form vertical video started out being 60 seconds or so. I think you can do like, you know, 45 minute videos or something like that on TikTok now. But yeah, uh, we're, we're gonna do some testing on that, so I don't recommend doing that yet. But yeah. Um, YouTube shorts, uh, came around in 2021, uh, and it has totally revolutionized things. It's a huge opportunity I think for churches out there. Um, now I'll just kind of explain there's some key differences between YouTube itself and YouTube shorts.
Speaker 0 00:01:37 Although they're on the same platform and you upload videos the exact same way. They have the same app. It's same thing, but it really is, it serves two different purposes. Again, the shorts, they are vertical videos. They're under 60 seconds, uh, and they're designed for quick engagement that people can kind of scroll through. Uh, and from a practical standpoint, I'd say what it is, the opportunity for churches, uh, is that it's actually there to build your audience. So it's a huge opportunity where the average person will never encounter one of your weekly sermons, uh, or they won't encounter maybe the, the, uh, announcement videos that maybe you're putting on YouTube. Yeah. They very well may encounter some of your short form videos if you make them in a style that is engaging and something that's, uh, easy for people to access there. So, uh, huge opportunity for, for churches and I think it's something that's worth looking into.
Speaker 1 00:02:28 Yeah. So then, yeah, definitely. And I think a lot of churches are interested in it, but what are some tips we can, you know, give churches to create excellent short videos?
Speaker 0 00:02:37 Yeah. Well, the name of the game with short videos is engagement and it really rises and falls on that. So there's all kinds of strategies that you can look into and different things that people say, but really everything boils ti down to everything boils down to how long we can keep people's eyes right on your content there. So, uh, if you do a, a 45 second video and people watch the whole 45 seconds and then maybe even start over again, the odds of you being shown to other people, they rise enormously. That's a huge, uh, sign to the algorithm that this was good content because it's keeping eyes and they'll be more likely to serve your content to that same person again because they've engaged with it before. Yeah. They'll engage with it again. And really the way that you do that, I think we kind of give like a three step approach to it, is you need a great hook.
Speaker 0 00:03:26 Something in the first two seconds that grabs their attention. You need to fulfill that hook. So you have to actually make good on it and actually explain what you said you were going to explain in the rest of the video. Yeah. And then you call people to action. You give them a way to respond, whether that be subscribing. And that's really one of the great things about YouTube shorts is it's great for building your audience for all of your other YouTube videos because they're great for getting people to subscribe to your channel, and then they're more likely to engage with the whole sermon or Right. The whole message that you may have preached there if they watch on YouTube later.
Speaker 1 00:04:01 Yep. Cuz they were engaged. That's good stuff. So, so, shifting gears a little bit, we know that search is big on, on YouTube, right? So I mean Yep. What, um, is there a way to optimize these for, um, search on YouTube?
Speaker 0 00:04:15 You know, you can, um, but you know, our philosophy on this and, and we, we do, so like when we do our shorts, we do about six a week is how many we're putting out here at Reach, right? And we do some base level search optimization. We play with titles and some of that kind of stuff. But really, I don't think that search is a huge opportunity when it comes to shorts. Again, it's all about that algorithm. It's what is the, on YouTube, it's called the Short Shelf. Uh, who is, who is YouTube gonna push your video out to? And that's entirely based on your retention, how long you can keep eyes on your video there. So now there's a chance that if you have a, a, a sermon that you did on, you know, mark chapter seven or something like that and you, you title it Mark chapter seven sermon and you put the verses in there and you have a lot of keywords, there's a chance. But in most cases, people are gonna, instead of clicking on a short video, they're gonna rather click on a full form video Yeah. If they're actually searching for these kinds of topics here. So we don't recommend spending a lot of time working on search optimization for shorts. Um, that is the opposite of true, uh, for your long form YouTube videos, for your sermon videos and other videos you're putting onto YouTube. You absolutely need to focus on search there, but don't get too caught up on search, I think for shorts.
Speaker 1 00:05:29 Oh, that's a good point. Good stuff. So, uh, other than that, I mean, so as far as the types of content for churches to consider, you know, for these shorts, what would we recommend there?
Speaker 0 00:05:41 Yeah, good question. I think that the two biggest opportunities are repurpose sermons. Uh, so this is taking your existing sermons, you're already doing all the hard work, you're filming it and you're editing it and you're putting it onto YouTube probably already. Anyway, taking that and actually changing the form, finding those maybe two or three highlights through the week where these are really important points from the sermon. They really stand on their own. I can get 'em down under 60 seconds. Mm-hmm. And then you take those, you add some captions, you put in some music and you make them kind of their own little package. Uh, and those really do well. So we see, uh, you're already doing the hard work for your sermons, you might as well turn them into shorts. It really is something you can do if you do it right in half an hour to an hour to really do it well.
Speaker 0 00:06:28 Uh, and that's a huge opportunity. Alternatively, we see a lot of traction with memes. Uh, memes are something that I think that you may think, well, why would a church put out memes? That's not what we're here to do. We're not here to make people laugh. Yeah. <laugh>, we're gonna give them spiritual encouragement. Well, right, right. I think if you think about what shorts do, they're here to grab attention from people. So you're trying to grab their attention. And if you grab their attention with a meme and they watch it, the thing about memes too is they're usually shorter and a lot of times they'll watch them multiple times or share them with their friends. So they're great ways to get attention from people. And then after that, they're more likely to watch other videos because YouTube looks at it and it says, well, this guy watched this meme four times.
Speaker 0 00:07:09 Let's show 'em another one of their videos and see how they respond to it. So maybe they'll show a full video, or maybe when they're surfing YouTube itself later, they're gonna see one of your full sermons on there because they saw your memes before and they liked them and they engage with that. So they're gonna engage with other content. So it really is a good opportunity, just like you think about it this way, churches often throw big events that um, don't necessarily have a spiritual component to them. So Right. Maybe you have a harvest party that you do as a church. Yeah. And that you don't like, insist that people go through a long prayer time as part of your harvest party. Right. You just go there and have fun. But the hope is that they will engage with your church. Maybe they'll rub some shoulders with other people there, and then they'll be more likely to come back to a service at some other time there. So same kind of philosophy, just in a digital form.
Speaker 1 00:07:55 That's good. And you know, I, when we think about social media and content that we put out on, on websites and everything, we've always known in like with a blog that you should be consistent. I would think, you know, you get a, you gotta be even more consistent since these are, uh, shorter, I mean, right. Yeah,
Speaker 0 00:08:14 Yeah. Yep. Absolutely. Um, I would encourage churches to do three a week, uh, three YouTube shorts. And this really could be the same for TikTok and Instagram. It's the same platform. That's the great thing about this new world we live in of short form video is that you can repurpose and repost plat uh, repost on different platforms. Yeah. It's really no problem there. So, um, so I think three is kind of the magic number that we've seen now. Uh, I think you could maybe get away with even more if you have the ability to do some of these meme type videos, some of that kind of stuff. But again, the keyword here is consistency. Yeah. What you don't wanna do is post one video once and then six weeks later post a video and kind of just go willy-nilly. What you should do is commit to some kind of a schedule and maybe just to start, you say, you know what? We're gonna do two, we're gonna do two videos every single week and we're gonna do it on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We're gonna commit to that schedule. Just doing that, you'll start to see some results and if you're seeing results that really are making an impact, you can start to increase from there. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:09:15 It's kinda like working out, right. Get in there a couple days a week and then see results and make it more
Speaker 0 00:09:20 <laugh>. Yeah. My wife tells me that we need to go from two to three. That's what we want to start doing, is moving up to three, uh, uh, three weightlifting workouts a week there. So do it anyway. <laugh>. Yeah, we should. So. Well, good. I hope this has been helpful to you guys. YouTube shorts is a huge opportunity for churches out there, so if it has been helpful, let us know when the comments below and we'll catch you guys next.
