I’ve heard writers say that that most difficult thing they deal with is a blank page. A page waiting for it to be filled with words that will tell stories and engage minds. The blank page can be intimidating, begging you to write, putting the pressure you to come up with an idea.
Sometimes, I look at social media the same way. I see a blank status update window from Twitter asking me “What’s happening?”. I know that I’m not going to write something on the level of Tolstoy but I’m also not going to update you on the awesome ham sandwich that I just ate.
Your church’s social media is not that different either. A lot of the times you feel the pressure to create a whole social media campaign all by yourself. This can include the graphics, the wording, the scheduling, tracking of metrics and engagement. It can be exhausting.
However, you don’t need to put the pressure on yourself to create social media and maintain it as a one person show. Instead, you have an army of people out there waiting to help you out. Best of all, they’ll do it for free because they believe in what you’re doing. Who are these people? Your congregation.
That’s right the people in pew have the power to help you accomplish your social media goals. The problem is that too many of us see them as our audience and not an active partner in social media. We view our congregation as passive viewers of our content who are only capable of viewing, sharing and liking. That’s sad because they’re capable of so much more.
Today, we’re going to talk about five secrets of unleashing the power of your congregation to help you achieve your social media goals. These five secrets are proven methods to engage your church, while equipping them be your social media ambassadors. Interested? Well here you go…
Hold a Social Media Tutorial
One of the assumption I made when I joined a church staff was that every church member knew about Facebook and at least had a profile page. Well, I was wrong. I was surprised to learn that a number of my church members had never tried Facebook nor did they know what Facebook was for. More specfically, I was surprised to learn that a large number of these people were our senior adults. I assumed that since majority of them probably had grandkids who had photos on Facebook, they would be as well. Again, I was wrong.
I knew that we had to get these people involved. These senior adults are some of our most active church members. They gave on Sunday, helped out in the preschool area and the sang in the choir. These were our core members.
So what did I do? Well, we decided to hold a brief tutorial on how to use Facebook. I did it right before a senior adult dinner meeting (to ensure maximum attendance). I didn’t get into too many details, but I covered how to sign up and how to like a page. Granted, I could have gone deeper, but I wanted to take some baby steps.
This is just the first step of many that we’re going to to take to engage our senior adults. Why am I focusing on our senior adults? First, they’re extremely passionate about the church and second they love to share our content, which makes promotion for us that much easier.
If you want to grow your social media engagement, you need to focus on senior adults. Despite the prevailing myth that social media is just for young adults, senior adults are becoming more and more active on social media. These passionate people would love to engage and share your church’s content.
Publicly Praise Your Congregation
Everybody loves encouragement and social media is the perfect medium to make that happen. If there’s any institution that should thrive on encouraging others, it should be the church.
Here’s an example of why this is important. When you publicly highlight and encourage your church volunteers, you’re doing two things. First, your showing everyone that kind of leadership that your church wants to everyone to model. Second, you’re giving your audience permission to encourage others as well.
One of the other factors of why publicly praising your congregation is important is that you’re also making your church feel smaller. No matter what size your church is, everyone wants a small church feel. They want to know people and they themselves want to be known. You can do this by publicly highlighting people in your social media.
Again, this unleashes your congregation by making them feel a part of your social media. It helps them feel connected to the church and to other people as well. The more they feel connected, the more likely they are to engage with your church’s content.
Give Your Congregation Room to Respond
Despite our best intentions a lot our social media can be a one way conversation. We really want to have active engagement, but instead end up giving our audience more commands (click here, share this, etc…) then we should. The result is a social media presence that seems one sided and locks our congregation out from being an active partner.
To break this cycle, we started asking our congregation a very simple question on social media: “How can we pray for you?”. Now that question may seem insignificant, but the responses we received argued otherwise.
By asking a simple question, we empowered our audience to respond to us. This allowed us not only to get great feedback, but also reinforce that we’re a church that prays for each other (it also helps the church feel smaller).
The more we can get our audience to respond, the more it will become natural to have a conversation with us online. These conversations eventually will spill out beyond just our Facebook page and hopefully into people’s news feeds which is where want those conversations to happen.
Sometimes you have to give your audience permission to respond to your social media. You would think that people would instinctively know this, but you would be surprised that it takes a little prompting to get to the conversation going.
Let Your Congregation Become Co-Creators
This next secret is a bit scary. I’ll admit as someone who likes to have control over the smallest detail, I’m not a big fan of losing control (especially when it comes to design). But I do know that if you let your audience co-create with you, you actually end up with something more valuable to everyone in the long run.
Let me give you a specific example. Let’s say for this Christmas, that instead of using stock art to create your sermon artwork, you instead hold a contest on Instagram. You would announce to the congregation that you’re looking for the best artwork to use this Christmas and that anyone can submit designs on Instagram with the hashtag #churchchrismasdesign (or something better than that). Then whichever design received the most likes would become the artwork for Christmas.
Now is there a chance that artwork could be ugly? Possibly. Could it have imperfections? More than likely. However, your audience will feel like they were co-creators in creating and choosing the artwork for Christmas. This type of empowerment is one that not only reinforces that your church cares what its member’s think, it also reinforces that they’re active members of the church.
(Note: I’m not saying that you should do this for everything and not hire a professional designer for i.e. large scale projects like branding, etc… Please designer friends, don’t send me hate mail.)
Pull Your Congregation Into the Moment
A while back I wrote how I learned that our church’s Sunday content only had about 48 hours to be relevant to our audience. Once the 48 hours were up (i.e. Tuesday afternoon), we needed to start the conversation about the next Sunday.
I’m beginning to believe that this window is getting shorter and shorter. No matter how good the worship service is, the chance that people are still thinking about it by the time The Walking Dead is airing on Sunday is pretty slim.
That’s why you have to engage your audience immediately after you have an encounter with them. For example, what if immediately after the worship service your pastor logged onto Periscope and did a live Q&A? The sermon topic would still be fresh on everyone’s mind, which means they’re more likely to think of questions that would engage with that topic.
Another way to immediately engage the audience to write a quick recap of the sermon immediately afterwards with quotes that can be tweeted using a tool like Click to Tweet. This recap doesn’t have to be long just a short synopsis of the sermon with a few questions. Once the recap is published you can tweet it out, share it on Facebook or text it out.
Think Women First
There are a lot of us who run social media who happen to males. While I love being a guy, I know that sometimes that can lead me to ignoring the majority of my audience. Women.
Now, I’m not intentionally leaving them out of the conversation nor am I actively trying to to disengage women on social media. However, there are small choices that I make in terms of language or color palettes that could easily turn the female audience off on social media. (Note: I’m not referring to theological language, rather the marketing language we use.)
I never really thought about this until, we did design some sermon series artwork and we tried something a little different. This small difference had women stopping one of my designers in the hallway to remark how much they loved the sermon series artwork.
I think it hit all of us that while we never wanted to leave women out of the conversation, by the fact that we were all males doing the design work, we weren’t intentionally thinking about our female audience.
Now I’m going to guess that if you took a look at your Sunday morning audience, at least half of your audience is female. So you’re probably not that different from our church. So the question is, are you designing your social media for both the male and female audience?
Maybe the better question is, which gender comprises majority of your social media audience? Are you creating content that would appeal to that audience? Are you losing out on engagement by ignoring that audience?
Now It’s Your Turn…
How do you engage your congregation? What secrets have you learned to keep your congregation involved with your social media? Click here to share below.