In the mid-2000s, life changed for all of us with the introduction of social media. Things like Twitter and Facebook altered our online experience. This also shifted the church marketing landscape pretty significantly.
What was once a word-of-mouth, flyer-heavy, local promotional plan has now moved into a digital space that can be reached anywhere in the world. Using social media content to promote and grow your church can be a game-changer in our digital age.
Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube offer powerful ways to connect with your congregation, engage with your community, and share your message with a broader audience. It expands your reach from your local area to anyone online worldwide. How do we use this fantastic opportunity to help the church?
Here are several tips on how to use social media content to promote and grow your church.
Create a Promotional Calendar
What are the significant dates for your church each year? Do you have a plan for special series or dates you’d like people to participate in? Do you have any events for which you want to do a more significant promotional push?
One of the best ways to use social media content to promote and grow your church is to have it ready to go on a promotional calendar. So, what things do you want to highlight for your church each year, month, and week? To give you an idea, several important ones to consider are Easter Sunday, Christmas, summer events, and any other significant things happening throughout the year.
You can create this promotional calendar by following a few simple steps:
- Ask yourself, “What do we want to achieve through social media?” Some ideas:
- Gain followers
- Get a certain level of church member and community engagement
- Spread the word in our area about our church
- Determine your key events and dates
- Create a promotional strategy and calendar
- What do you want to post when?
- How many posts will you make a day/week/month?
Build a Graphics Library
Once you’ve determined your promotional calendar, you can start preparing the content. Do you want a specific theme or style, or look? Do you want it to change from thing to thing? As you think through these various items, keep your target audience in mind. For example, social media photos must be engaging and exciting to capture attention. While a simple image could perform really well on social media, it may not give you the promotion you’re looking for. So, as you prepare your content, consider what you want to achieve with each post and ensure the graphics library supports that.
An excellent resource for building a graphics library is Shift Worship. Shift Worship has a large selection of social media graphics available for you and your church. Once you find graphics you want to use from the extensive library, you can download the JPEG ready to use or the editable PSD (in case you want to add your church logo or make other edits).
Note: Please consider your promotional calendar as you build your graphics library. If you’re not planning to promote something, you don’t need it in your graphics library.
Promote Events
Do you have your promotional calendar and your graphics library ready? If so, now you are all set to start promoting events. There are various ways to use social media to do this, so here are a few:
- Facebook Ads – You can purchase Facebook Ads to help target people in your community and surrounding areas. Once these ads are created, Facebook will show those ads to those who fall into your criteria.
- Facebook Events: You can create Facebook events for major events happening in your church and share them on the platform to help reach those who have never attended your church.
- Instagram – You can post your promotional photo(s) on Instagram to capture your followers’ attention. Encourage your church to share your posts on their personal accounts. The more your posts are shared on Instagram, the broader the reach will be.
Highlight Sermon Series
For many churches, there are critical times in the year when some extra promotion of the sermon series is beneficial. For example, are you doing a series to reach the lost in your area? Do you want to cast a wide net to reach people for your Easter series? Whatever the reason may be, there are a few things you can do to use social media content to promote and grow your church.
- Create ads – You can create ads on social media platforms to invite people to your church for the new series. You can target certain zip codes or areas to reach those only in your location.
- Use Facebook Groups – Are you doing a series you want everyone’s involvement in? You can use Facebook Groups to establish an online community around the series. Your congregation can invite their family and friends to participate in the group as an easy “starting point” for those who may not be ready to attend a service just yet.
- Shareable images – Get your church involved. You can provide your church congregation with shareable graphics to promote the sermon series on their personal social media accounts. You want these images everywhere, so encourage people to post them everywhere they can to reach as many as possible.
- Instagram Reels – You can create short videos (Reels) to promote things on Instagram. Make it exciting and engaging because you only have a few seconds to capture people’s attention. When creating the reels, use trending music to help boost your reach. On Instagram, if you use a trending song, it will be shared with a much larger audience and increase your overall views.
As a bonus, we’d encourage you to check out Shift Worship. There, you can find several sermon title ideas and customizable graphics to give you everything you need.
Using social media content to promote and grow your church can seem like a daunting task at first, but don’t lose heart. You will see results if you put in the work, learn the ropes, and use the incredible tools available.
At one point in time, promoting and growing your church happened solely as a word-of-mouth process. Your congregants would invite their family, friends, neighbors, coworkers, etc. While the in-person invite is still vitally important, social media is a great tool to help promote and grow your church.
Statistics show that the average Instagram user spends at least 30 minutes on the app daily. In 2021, Facebook was estimated to have nearly 2.96 billion users worldwide. So, with that in mind, social media platforms are something your church needs to take advantage of. Learn the platforms and their many benefits to you and your congregation.
