If you’re creating a lot of content for your church, you know how much work it takes to produce that content. You also probably know that a good portion of that content is disposable. It’s used for a small amount of time and then quickly thrown away. However, there’s a better way to use your time.
Yes, there are times when you have to create graphics, articles and videos for sermon series or seasonal events (Christmas, Easter, etc…). However, that content usually becomes dated very quickly. So one way to balance that out is by creating what we call evergreen content.
When we talk about evergreen content, we’re referring to content that is not time-sensitive. Just like the term “evergreen” infers, it’s content that stays good for a long time. For example, let’s say your children’s minister writes an article on how to lead a child to Christ. This is an article that can be republished on your social networks, not what time of the year it is.
Now why focus on evergreen content? Well, first it’s the type of content that can help build your SEO (search engine optimization). Second, you don’t have to worry about this type of content randomly being discovered on your site. For example, if you’re website is full of mostly dated content, then you have to make sure that the content is cleaned up periodically, so it won’t cause confusion with your audience.
This happened to our old website about two years ago. On our website there was an old article from 2011 highlighting our Christmas Eve schedule. For some reason, it ranked #1 when you googled “Brentwood Christmas Eve”. Of course, people found the article and assumed it was the correct schedule for the 2013 Christmas season. Needless to say we had some unhappy visitors.
So you can see why evergreen content is a good choice to have on your website. Here are some ideas of evergreen content for your church website.
Evergreen Content Ideas
- How to Lead Your Child to Christ
- How to Study the Bible
- What We Believe About the Bible
- What Is a Tithe and Why Is It Important
- Misconceptions about the Bible
- Why We do the Lord’s Supper
- Why We Love Small Groups
- How Our Church is Goverened
- Practical Ways to Love Your Family
- What We Believe About Evangelism
- Is Christ Coming Back? What We Believe About the End-Times
- How Our Church was Formed
- How to Share the Gospel
- Five Ways to Invite Your Friends to Church
- Ten Key Myths About Jesus
Okay, so now that you’ve got ideas for evergreen content. How do you take advantage of it? Well one way to do that is to make sure you have a good social media posting schedule. Again, the advantage of evergreen content is that you can post it at varying times and dates without worrying that the content is out of date. So let’s pretend that you have article on what your church believes about feeding the poor. Here’s what a schedule for your article could look like:
Sample Posting Schedule
Day 1 (the day your article goes live)
Twitter (3x) 9am, 2pm, 6pm
Facebook (1x) 7:30am
Instagram (1x) 7:30am
Day 2
Twitter (1x) 7:30pm
Day 7
Twitter (1x) 7:30pm
Facebook (1x) 6pm
Day 30
Twitter (1x) 7:30pm
Day 180 (or any other day past four months)
Twitter (1x) 7:30pm
Now let me explain the rationale for this schedule. A lot of churches assume that if they post their content once, then they’re done. However, as I’ve said before not all social media networks are the same in the way in they treat content. So we need to approach each day a little differently.
Day 1
On day one (the day the article goes live), we’re going to post the article around three times on Twitter, once on Facebook and once on an Instagram image. We’ll post multiple times on Twitter since it’s a social network that users dive in and out of, so people are checking it throughout the day. With Facebook we’re going to post once, since Facebook users spend more time on the network in a single session and we don’t want Facebook to think we’re spamming. If Facebook detects that we’re just reposting the same content, our posts will possibly get pushed down in people’s news feeds.
Finally on day one, we’ll post one Instagram photo. I wouldn’t expect to get too much traffic from Instagram, but you might have some audience members that you want to make aware of the content.
Day 2
Then on day two, we’ll highlight the content again on Twitter. Again, with Twitter, users check in at all sorts of times so it’s okay to repeat your tweet from the previous day. However, we’re not going to post on Facebook since we don’t want to give Facebook the impression that we’re spamming.
Day 7, 30, 180
Then one week later, we’ll post again on Twitter and Facebook. We’ll do the same thing one month later. You’ll be surprised how many people will share your content a week or a month later. Once we get past day 30, then we’ll look at posting again 4-6 months down the road.
Remember, we can’t assume that just because you posted your content once or twice that people are going to consume it or share it. The key is to find a schedule that maximizes your evergreen content.
As you can see evergreen content is really a good use of your time as you can keep sharing this content year-round. Try it out and see if it works for you church!
PS. If you want some additional reading on this subject, check out this great post from CoSchedule on social media posting schedules.