A few months ago I started to notice to something weird about our church’s social media. It seemed that on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday our social media was getting plenty of interaction. However, when Wednesday came around our content would start to take a dip and that dip would continue into Saturday.
Of course we started questioning our strategy and asking if we weren’t pushing the right content. There was nothing odd there. Was it the time we were posting? No, we were posting at consistent times throughout the week. It seemed that there wasn’t any irregularities with our methods.
Then we started to form a theory that the problem wasn’t our timing or content, but it was our audience. We realized our audience emotionally connected with our content right after Sunday worship. Then as the week went on, the less our content was relevant to our audience. It seemed that our content only had 48 hours to live (“48 hours” being from Sunday to Tuesday).
So we had two options for the “48 hours”, we could either focus on our weaknesses and try to fix our other days of the week or we could try to use the 48 hours to our advantage. We chose the latter of the two. Here’s how we focused on the 48 hours:
The First 48 Hours
- First 12 Hours (Sunday) – We focus on live tweeting the sermon (about 4-5 tweets) and then at least one Instagram photo of a quote (which is cross-posted to Facebook, it’s one of the few times I’m okay with cross-posting). Down the road we would like to provide key sermon video clips immediately following the worship service. We’re not there yet, but we will be.
- 24 hours Later (Monday) – We start off the morning with a video clip from the sermon and another Instagram image quote. This video clip is uploaded to YouTube and Facebook (remember to upload the video to Facebook and not link it from an outside source). We then tweet out the Youtube clip. In this case, Facebook usually works best for us. If we can get the clip posted by 6 or 7am we’re guaranteed to get the maximum impact.
- 48 Hours Later (Tuesday) – At this point we’re squeezing the last bit out of the worship service content. We repeat the same thing that we do Monday, however we understand that the content might not be as strong as Monday’s. This helps us set realistic expectations for our content.
Why Focus on the First 48 Hours?
Okay, so why you would you want to focus on the first 48 hours? The power of the focusing on the first 48 hours is that your capitalizing on your best content that you’ll have all the week and that content is the worship service. I’ve written before how the sermon is a goldmine of content and I believe the the worship service should be the bedrock of your content throughout the week. The most important thing your church will do all week is provide your congregation the teaching of God’s word. So you should reinforce that in the first 48 hours.
What about the Rest of Week?
So if you spend a lot energy on the first 48 hours, what do you do the rest of the week? Ignore it? Of course not! The rest of the week is just as important however you have to work harder to make the emotional connection with your audience then you would in the first 48 hours. This means using personal stories and championing your audience in ways that makes them feel like a part of the experience (for example, check our this volunteer shout out that Katie Allred created).
You want your audience to connect to your content. Make sure you not only produce great content, but you also put it in the right context. That not only means placing it on the right social media networks, it also means timing your content to the rhythms of your audience and the first 48 hours.
What do you do the first 48 hours after Sunday worship? Click here to share your thoughts below.