3 Easy Ways To Improve Your Church's Social Media

Thank you, guys. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, everybody for being here with us today. Excited about this.

This is the first Faithworks webinar that we've had. I'm excited about it. My name is Jono Long. I'm the owner of Faithworks Marketing, and we work with Churches and nonprofits. I'll introduce my friend here in a minute.

Today we're talking about 3 Easy Ways To Improve Your Church's Social Media, which is kind of, maybe misleading, cause we're probably going to give you like 78 ways to improve your Church's social media and you could probably just grab 3 of those. So, you know, try to keep up, but we're going to give you some good stuff.

I'm really thankful that you're here. If you've got any questions that pop up about anything, we're talking about, drop those in the chat or drop those in the questions and we'll do our best to answer those and I'll try my best to see them in the corner of my eye, make sure that we get those.

Anyway, like I said, I'm Jono, I'm the owner here at Faithworks Marketing. I was in student ministry in the Metro Atlanta area for like 21 years, started in 1999, and then got kind of old and, here I am doing marketing for Churches and Faith-based Nonprofits. Today with us, we have the Worship Leader, the one and only, Worship Pastor at Journey Church over in Monroe.

It's actually in Between, Georgia. Literally the name of the little town is Between. Zach, Zachary Orr is with us, and that's Zach and Zach is, probably in the same position as a lot of you guys, a lot of Church leaders where he's wearing multiple hats. How many positions do you hold at Journey there? Like 12, 13.

Yeah, something like that.

So social media also falls under his purview and so we've got him with us today talking about that. Little fun fact, little trivia there for you. Zach, the second Church, I served at, Palmetto Baptist Church from '03 to '05, down in a little town called Palmetto, Georgia.

Zach's dad was the Pastor there and Zach was a punk in the youth group that I didn't really like all that much and then once we got him off the drugs and got him saved, he started leading worship. Just kidding. Just kidding. Zach's one of the most talented musicians I know.

He's really good at social media. He doesn't give himself enough credit for it, but anything I miss there, Zach, anything you'd like, tell everyone about yourself. You think you'd like to brag about.

No, nothing I'd like really to like to brag about, but I think what's going to be hopeful about this webinar is that I've done social media, mostly for mid-sized Churches.

So, I'm not coming at you with a mega Church background that has an unlimited budget. I've had to do a lot of the grunt work myself over the years, so quite a bit of experience with it so far.

Yeah, very cool, so Zach's right there in the trenches and I think that's a really good point.

I think you're going to learn a lot from him today. He's got a lot of good stuff to say, and I'm going to ask him some questions to try to stump him. So, if you've got some questions, throw those at us. Anyway, without further ado, we'll just kind of go ahead and jump into it.

So, what we want to accomplish today, and by the end of the session, is we want you guys to know how to make a plan, how to determine your social media strategy. Because I feel like, and I've been in situations where managing social media, it’s just kind of, Oh, dang. We got to post something today. Everybody else has posted.

You know, it's Tuesday, that's the day we said we were going to post, what are we going to post? Well, we got this coming up and there's really no plan to it. We're just shooting from the hip, and, when that happens, it really becomes more of an annoyance than anything, and then we're not really doing our best.

The second thing that we're going to talk about is how to build a team, how to recruit and develop a team to produce your social media content. The goal here is for you not to be doing it all by yourself for you to have some help, because if you're, especially if you're on staff at the Church, or if you're a high-capacity volunteer, you're probably wearing multiple hats.

You've got several roles and at different times of the year, if you're the worship leader and it's time for Easter, you've got a lot of things on your plate and social media may need to go on the back burner if you're the only one doing social media. So that's where having a good team can help fill in.

The third thing that we want you to walk away with is the thought of how to make it matter, how to take your social media from just marketing to actual ministry. We'll dive deeper into that. Now, Zach that was telling, I asked Zach, you got to tell everybody, this is why Zach should be teaching you how to do social media because Zach, not only is he great at it, but he's also made a mistake here and there. So, I asked him what was one of your biggest social media mess ups for the Church, and then he told me this story.

So, I'm going to let Zach take it from here. Yeah. So, at a Church I served at about five or six years ago, we had a bunch of creative meetings trying to figure out how to promote our Christmas services and somehow landed on, all agreed upon, the fact that we were going to give away a puppy in each of our Christmas Eve services.

So, we started for promoting this, getting people to come to our Christmas Eve service that we were going to have a raffle at each of the services and whichever kid's name that we drew from a Santa hat was going to get to come up on stage and get a free puppy for Christmas. Now, we thought this was a great idea, a way to just get people excited about coming into our service. Whatever. We might catch a little flack for you know, trying to commercialize it a little bit, but we're, you know, we justified that saying we were, we were reaching people who may not otherwise come, whatever.

Well, what we didn't expect was for all of the animal lovers to come out of the woodworks to just completely slam us, obliterate us on social media and yeah, that was bad. We wound up canning that idea. All the animal lovers are actually leaving this webinar podcast right now.

You know, I wonder had you guys gone through with it, would it have actually helped attendance or hurt it because like, as a guy with five kids well, and you as a parent now. Were you a parent then? When you... no.

I was not apparent then, we had people in the meeting who were parents.

We just kind of thought like, if you don't want your kids to get a puppy, then you don't sign up for the raffle.

But every kid was going to want to sign. Cause yeah. Cause if my kid wanted a puppy and I had to take another mouth to feed, already having two dogs that I don't want, I would've been upset. I would've been like, I'm just going to have to, like, as soon as my kid drops her name in the bucket and walks away, I would've had to pull it out or not attend the service at all.

Yeah. It was an awful idea. It was a terrible idea that we should have realized very early on, and we proceeded anyway.

I remember where I was when that post went live.

I was sitting on my couch, and I didn't serve at this Church. I wasn't on staff with him then. Zach and I have been on staff at two different Churches together. Not this one. I would have clearly stepped in and said, no, let's not do this. I would have saved the day there. But I do remember just being on Facebook that morning and sitting on my couch and seeing that post and be like. Hm, wonder, how this is interesting.

What I expected was what you said at the beginning, that there was going to be a lot of like over spiritualization of it. Saying, oh, my gosh, how can you take the focus off Jesus and put it on a puppy? You know that there would be a lot of that. I don't know that there was any of that. What began to swell was people, you know, not knowing where this animal was going to end up. So, if giving a puppy away is on your social media calendar, we're going to encourage you to go ahead and scratch that.

Number one easy way to improve your Church's social media is, don't give away puppies.

Don't do anything with animals except post pictures of puppies, and just say, puppies are awesome. That's all you need to do, leave it there.

So, if that doesn't qualify Zach as the pro and why you should stick around and listen to the rest of this, then I don't know what would. Oh yeah, you could have announced in advance that all the shots are all taken care of for a year.

Might have gone around it that way. Yeah, the PETA people, they were not going for that. They were very concerned with where we were getting these puppies from. What families they were going to. How they would be cared for beyond the service. Lots of things that we should have thought about, but we did not.

But since you hate animals, you hate animals so much. You just went for it.

So social media, social media is critical. It's a big deal. It's not something that you can just ignore. It's not something that is just, you know, 10th on the list of things to do. But I do feel like it’s probably annoying if you're in Church leadership and you don't love social media.

It probably does annoy you and not to mention in pandemic land. I don't know if anyone at other Churches, if any of your Church members ever post things about COVID on Facebook. I don't know if it's just our Church that people talk about politics and COVID and things like that. Or it's just my friends in this area.

But social media is even more of, in some ways dumpster fire, but it's also critical. What do you think? How critical is it Zach?

Yeah, I think it's super important if for no other reason than because these days people are looking at your Facebook, they're looking at your Instagram and your website.

Usually, multiple times before they ever visit for the first time. That's just something that we do as a culture now. I know that when my wife and I want to check out a restaurant, we're looking to see pictures of the inside of the restaurant. We want to see pictures of food.

We want to know what the menu is like before we ever decide to go visit that restaurant. It's the same way with your Church. So, you got to make sure that your social media accounts, your website, and all are accurately reflecting what your Church is like so that people will have the right idea before they show up.

We were talking about this earlier that that social media is not just a, and I think we're going to hit on this a little bit more in a minute, but it's not just like a vehicle to talk about ministry. It's not just the avenue to get the word out about ministry, but it literally is ministry, and ministry can be done on social media. I think the other thing, and this is what, I heard the guys from, I think it was from North Point Church. They were talking about how everything they post on social media. I mean, it's from the filter of looking at, you know, what is someone who's never going to be here?

Who's never been here before. What are we showing them? So, they don't do all these funky angles that you know, in the sanctuary that no one could ever get to, to get a cool angle of the, of the worship service, but they want to show you what it's actually like to sit in the worship service.

What is actually liked to drop your kids off on Sunday morning, you know? So, to be able to reassure parents that, you know, we've got a secure check-in process for the kids, and it's not just pandemonium Lord of The Flies when you drop off your kids. That's something that needs to be on social media.

That's critical for convincing the parent that maybe a little nervous, apprehensive about bringing their kid to hang out with you at your Church. That's a huge deal. Totally critical.

All right. Number one, Make A Plan. Take it away, Zach.

I think the first thing that you should do, which if you watch any YouTube video about how to grow your social media account, or if you sign up for Skillshare or something like that, you're watching someone else's class on town to grow your social media account.

What everyone is going to tell you is that you need to figure out what your account is for and what your goals are for your account. So, for instance, our Church, is to do what I was describing before. I don't have a ton of time to devote to social media because I'm also taking care of production and making videos and all of our graphics and doing worship and all this sort of things.

So, for us, social media exists to give people a snapshot of what Sunday morning is like. So that when someone goes online and they're looking to find out what's Journey Church like, they're going to go to our Instagram. They're going to go to our Facebook. They're going to visit our website and they'll be able to see pictures and posts that reflect who we are. Now, that may not be your goal for social media.

You may want to take it a step further and actually actively help people in their spiritual journey or something. Teach people how to read the Bible, teach people how to pray, provide some kind of counseling through your social media account. If that's the case having that goal in mind to begin with will help you make a plan for everything else.

Beyond that, once you figured out what your goal is, you want to figure out, okay, what is feasible for me? There's Churches out there that post every single day, multiple times a day. At a Church I used to serve at our pastor, wanted us to post three times a day. We had a lot of trouble coming up with content that was actually worth posting to post that often.

So, we just wound up posting a bunch of stuff that nobody cared about. And we went quality over quantity, which ultimately hurts your social media accounts because then people start to ignore you. And the more they ignore you, then the algorithms on social media will de-prioritize your accounts to your followers.

So less and less people will see your stuff. No matter how many times you're posting. So, it's, it's always better to have quality over quantity. And so, if you look at your schedule and you think, I only really have time to post once a week or twice a week, three times a week. Something like that. You can't do every day.

That's perfectly fine. Just be willing to stick to that for a long period of time.

Less is more, three really good, well thought out good-looking posts are way better than 15 mediocre posts that you just kind of pulled out of the air.

The next thing to think about is, okay, who are you trying to reach?

Which sometimes it becomes an uncomfortable thing to identify as a Church because of course we think we know that the gospel is for everyone. We want to reach everyone regardless of stage of life, but it will help your account if you can narrow down and say, okay. Everyone is important, but we would really like to focus on families with young kids.

And if that's the case, then your, the photos that you post, the content that you post, the blog posts you share, or articles you share, they're going to reflect that target. And it'll give a lot more definition to your accounts and a lot more focus to your account. And then I would encourage you to think beyond the post.

So, if someone comes across your posts, what are you wanting them to do from there? Do you want to push them to your website? Do you want to, again, encourage them to study the Bible in different way or to begin praying more consistently? What is the purpose behind the posts besides just coming up with something in order to throw out there, which goes back to our quality over quantity discussion is that if you, if you have a purpose for the post, if you're thinking beyond just what someone is going to briefly see and read that's going to help you reach too, because people are engaging with it more. They may be more likely to comment more likely to like the post or likely to share it if it's meaningful for them.

The more all of that is happening, the more the algorithms on social media are saying, Hey, this account is important, and we want to make sure that people are seeing this more frequently.

So, what would you say then about posts that just are kind of fun and silly? Are they worth doing, you know, just a trivia question or you know, who's your favorite Marvel hero?

You know, are those we're doing? Is that, is that dumb? Is it a waste of time? Is it unspiritual. What do you think there?

I think they're helpful. I call those the irresistible questions and we use those pretty often. They aren't that spiritual, usually they're something silly.

Like, do you keep your butter out on the counter or do you keep it in the fridge? Let us know in the comments. So, people get surprisingly opinionated with questions like that, and it sparks a lot of discussion and that in turn tells the algorithm that your account is important and that it should be shown to more people.

If you're looking for a question to ask that you want just to go viral, start the whole temperature argument, what temperature should the thermostat be on? I did a post like that. I've only had one post go, even if you could consider it viral. And it was like back in 2017, I posted it.

Me and my wife were arguing about it. And I said that 67 degrees is perfectly adequate in the winter for the heat to be on. And that's what it should be on and possibly lower in the summer and dude, that blew up and then you see it now, like if you, you talk about temperature, you get people talking, you can just do a thermostat post every week.

If your social media is terrible on engagement. We got a question. So, Kenneth is asking, do you suggest having only one main Church page or having the pages of the Church for like young adults and like youth ministry having its own page. If there's like an evangelistic effort or men's ministry.

So, do you think everybody should have their own page or do you think just like one main page for the Church?

My personal opinion is one main page for the Church. That's what we do. But it’s kind of, again goes back to, what is your goal for, for your social media page? If it's primarily just serving as a springboard for announcements for you, then maybe it makes more sense to have them all separately.

I don't know. Do you even have enough content for each of those areas to put on each of those pages? You know what I mean? Like for as far as my Church goes, we do not have enough women's ministry things happening that we would only be able to fill up or we would be able to fill up solely a women's ministry, Instagram account or whatever.

So, it makes more sense for us to have just one Church wide account that gets all of those things.

I would agree with that. I would say, you know, if you start creating multiple. Well, for a few reasons, you start, every ministry has its own Facebook page. You definitely lose a lot of consistency and then, and it could potentially become the wild west and you don't really know what's getting put out there.

The truth is, you know, your whole Church is anybody who's going to follow. They're definitely going to follow the main page. So why not just funnel everything through there? I do think it's a good idea for like youth ministry to have its on Instagram.

You know, children's ministry has its own Instagram maybe even TikTok or something like that. If there's an age-appropriate app that fits within a demographic a little bit more, but I would definitely vote for the one Church Facebook page.

What I would say is that if you wanted, like the young adults to have something that you could communicate with them directly, that's where Facebook groups come in. If you're looking for something that would just be for like insiders, basically, you know, we're going to use the Facebook page is kind of the sign in the yard, the front door, letting everybody know what we're about, but once you're inside, you want to know what's so that we're not having to fill up that, that front door with just event after event, our internal communication really use the groups for that.

The nice thing about the groups too, is that with groups, I mean, everybody can answer and help each other out in those. You do have to monitor it and kind of moderate some things. But you know, if somebody's got a question like, Hey, what time does such and such start this special event start on Saturday? Well, somebody else in the group probably knows the answer. So, the next question is sort of for Zach, do you guys have Instagram for adults, for kids and another for youth ministry?

We have one for student ministry and then another one for everything else.

So welcometojsm is the handle for our student ministry. And then welcometojourney is for everything, family ministry so college and up which would also include kids. We put stuff on there for kids as well, because most kids don't have social media accounts. Dare I say, maybe they shouldn't. Targeting kids with a social media account, isn't a profitable endeavor. It's good for teenagers to have their own thing because for one teenager don't want to have anything to do with something that their parents have something to do with, you know. So, they, they like just, just that aspect of it is that they have their own thing that is separate from something that their parents are also seeing is appealing to them.

But it just provides an avenue for your Student Pastor to connect with them one-on-one as well.

You guys, you do a LinkedIn profile for all your deacons. Right? You've got the actual, I'm just kidding. All right. So, I think we answered that.

All right. Pick back up where you left off there Zach?

I think that was it for me for the first thing for making a plan. The next thing would be to build a team. So, one of the best things I have ever done as far as social media goes for the Church that I'm at now is starting a team of photographers.

So, I'm not the one who is trying to handle getting content or getting pictures for content on Sunday morning. I can just focus on the worship and production and connecting with new people and that sort of thing. So, I'll tell you for me, we have announced it and asked people to, to sign up for this team.

That seldom works for me. There are just all calls from, from the stage thing. Hey, are there any photographers who would like to serve in this area? I know that works for some people. It's never worked for me. What I've found a lot. I've had a lot more luck in doing is just asking around for people who are interested in photography or who happen to be photographers, and then asking them personally, shooting them a text or send them an email or asking them in person on a Sunday morning.

We're fortunate enough to have a lady named Terry who is a professional photographer. She's amazing. And so, I just schedule her on Planning Center, just like anybody else. And about once a month, she comes in and spends the whole day with us on Sunday mornings, even starting in rehearsal with the band and stuff.

She takes a couple of hundred pictures that day and then uploads them to a folder that I can access, and so can the rest of the staff, and we can just come through there and download the pictures that we want to plug into our social media or use on our website or, or whatever. And she does a phenomenal job.

I even asked her. Leading up to this. Okay. What equipment would you recommend? What equipment do you use? And she stressed to me that the most important thing, as far as the camera goes is the lens. And not necessarily the camera itself, you do want the camera that has a removable lens so that you can get a different kind.

But the lens is by far more important than the camera itself. And she uses one that is 70 to 200 millimeters with a f-stop of a limit of 2.8. So, I looked that up they're about $1,300, $2,600, which is that's a lot of money for, for a lens, especially if you're just starting out. I think that's just a regular 50 millimeter will do the trick.

Or if you have, if you have one of the newer model smartphones with portrait mode or something like that, that can do the trick as well. You know, something that can blur the background.

Yeah. I mean, if you have an Android, you probably just want to take that and throw it the garbage. I'm just kidding.

I'm just kidding. I'm a Mac evangelist, but yeah, like, I mean like an iPhone 12, iPhone 13 if you take a, if you, you know, if you spend a minute getting you know, framing it, right. And then Zach's going to talk about this in a minute, but spend just a, just another minute editing it. You can, you can upgrade the quality of your social media feed pretty quickly.

Yeah. Big time. So, our team, obviously I mentioned Terry, we've also had some students that have helped. And what I stress with them is that there's like minimal training that goes on there to teach them how to use their camera. They get a good lens and then we briefly go over. Okay. How does ISO work?

How does aperture work? How does exposure work? Will their camera do they have any like Kelvin settings that would adjust the temperature of the, of the photograph? And then we get them familiar with their own camera and then just kind of turn them loose. And I mean, especially with the teenagers, I mean, honestly, 80% or more of the photos that they take for us are unused, but that, you know, if they take, if they take a hundred pictures and there are, are 10 of them in there that we can use, you know, we're only posting once a day or three times a week or. You know that that covers a large amount of time.

Like I already mentioned, we want to focus foreground and the blurred background just because that looks nice on social media, but then what do they take pictures of? I just tell them leave no stone unturned, get pics of everything because we want people to know exactly what it's like at our Church before someone shows up for the first time.

Like, like Jono already said how North Point recommends doing things, you know, taking pictures from perspectives of what it would be like to be here, not funky angles, not turn to camera shots or something like that.

And then once I get those pictures in, I will edit them, Terry edits hers herself, but she uses the same program that I do. And that's Lightroom, Adobe Lightroom. Microsoft Paint. But no, seriously Adobe Lightroom is the best thing to use. And even if you have no idea how to edit a photo at all you can download Lightroom presets from different websites.

I use creativemarket.com and you can just search Lightroom preset bundle, and they're super affordable. I had downloaded one, that's got over 2000 presents in it for $29 and I've used it for years. So, it just, you import those into light room, and you can just sort of scroll through and see what they look like.

And once you find one that you. Just copy and paste it onto all of your pictures. So that on your Instagram feed, everything looks uniform and the same. You're using the same preset for all of them. Get the same lighting, same kind of colors that you're using.

 Lightroom is part of the Adobe Creative Suite, and so you'd have to purchase Lightroom. There are different subscription levels. But it's also, you can, I mean, you can use it on your back, your PC and you also, I've got it on my phone.

And so, you can use those presets there, you know, and really make it look good even. I mean, it can take an iPhone picture and make it look really nice with it. And so, one of the things we know is that Facebook doesn't love text on photos. They don't love us to put a lot of junk on photos, which and sometimes you'll see in a lot of Churches, like really all that ends up in the newsfeed is, sermon graphics and event graphics.

And so, the whole newsfeed is full of just, you know, Photoshop or Canva design, stuff like that. And so, Zach, what would you say how much. As far as the percentage wise, are you just posting pictures with a caption that has something to say about it versus a picture with something with some text on it or our design on it versus a, a survey graphic?

What are your percentages there?

I'll say, I don't know exactly what my percentages are. I would say my go-to is just to use a photograph with no texts. Sometimes if I have a really great picture of say, the worship team, then I'll overlay it with, with lyrics, from a Psalm that we've been worshiping with on the weekend or something like that, not the entire song, just a couple of lines or something like that, or maybe a, a Psalm or a scripture verse.

But a lot of times I save whatever that quote is for the caption itself, because. Me personally, I'm not a big talker. And so, coming up with the caption for me is the hardest thing. And so, if I already know what I want to assign to, or to go with that picture, instead of putting it on the picture, I put it in the caption because that's just, what's easier for me.

Along with Lightroom, if you're, if you're looking for something more affordable, of course Canva is an option. A lot of people use Canva. We use Canva, this presentation, we've made this in Canva, super easy to use super affordable, lots of templates.

For social media, especially if you're doing like student ministry, social media, or your Church has a younger median age. There's an app that is one of my favorites. It used to be called Over and then GoDaddy bought it and it's called Studio now. So, it's the app in the app store Studio by GoDaddy. And it's like, it's kind of like Canva. But edgier, so like, just as far as the cool factor of the templates, there's some templated and stuff in there.

If you're looking for just something to kind of spice things up a little bit, and, and even you know, for your, you can make event graphics in there, you could even make, you know, sermon series slides in there. So that's just another one. It's like it's called the Studio. It's by GoDaddy the app icons like got a little squiggly blue line across it.

So, take a look at that. That's one of my favs there.

So, another question came in Zach. What if your Church is event driven? And I guess, is that in relationship to, I think I need some more context on that question.

What if your Church is event driven? Are you saying like, as far as what tools to use? Or what to post? Oh, so like when posting, when flyer. So, if your Church is event driven posting flyers, stuff like that meaning a lot of your promotion is around events, I'm assuming. I would say, people are going to get more, we have at least two to three big events each week.

So, I guess some of that would depend on what the events are, you know, are we saying two to three big events, like outreach invite the community in, and these are like big meals, or these are you know, like music events, or are we saying this is, are these like the big youth ministry gatherings?

Two to three big events a week. That, that does feel like a lot. So yeah, like outreach, community events, Church events I mean, all of those things, to me, all of those things I think are going to be full of people and you want a photographer there. If you've got, I mean, if you're doing that many events, you've got the capacity to do that, then I'm going to assume that you've got somebody probably more than one person in that Church that is decent with a camera.

I would say that you could recruit and have someone in all of those events and then, you know, Fill up your social media with, you know, here, here's what we did. Here's what we've got coming. Keep those things. I would say here's something that a lot of Churches miss is that they don't keep things organized enough, like in Dropbox or in Google Drive.

And so, then they miss out on when it's time to promote next year, same event, they cannot find last year stuff. And so, they're having to go get screenshots off of Instagram, you know, to make their promotions and stuff. So, you know, keep that stuff hanging on to it. Even the stuff that you don't use. And Zach, what do you have to say about that?

I think all of that's good. I think as a general rule, I try what I call those things. When I'm posting an event on social media, like an announcement kind of thing, and I'm inviting someone to something our Church is doing, I call that an ask and I try to only do one ask for every five posts. And that's just because of the nature of social media that no one goes onto social media looking for other people's stuff.

People go on social media to consume to learn, to get help with something to find some kind of content, some kind of substance. And so, if the only thing that you ever post on social media is an ask, is an invitation to something that you're doing somewhere else that isn't even related to social media.

Then eventually they're going to stop reading it altogether. They're just going to scroll past and the more times that they scroll past, the more you're telling the social media algorithm that your page is not important to that person. So, they're going to get shown it less and less frequently.

So, I would try not to do that. If I can help it, obviously those things are important if you want to promote the things going on. But if you can do it in a different way, if you can, like one of the things that that I, I tell myself when I'm coming up with a post is to show don't tell.

So, if at all possible, it's better to provide an example than to tell someone about something. So instead of saying, Hey, you should sign up for a community group. Instead, I'll post a picture of a couple that is involved in community groups and in the caption have a quote from them, talking about why community group is important to them.

Like that's, it's still advertising your event, but it's doing it in a different way. That is interesting. If that makes sense.

 I would encourage you to literally create a Facebook event for the events. For one you can, then you've got the ability to create a targeted ad from that event and get some engagement there.

And so, then you can share it and you're going ahead and calling it what it is rather than, you know, slipping it in on the newsfeed. Events are going to get a good bit more engagement too if you do it right. Whereas, you know, if you've got a thousand followers on your Church's profile and you do the best post, unless it gets about 10 shares really quick, then the most you can expect, you know, Facebook's going to show that to maybe 15% of your fans, it's going to make it on about 150 newsfeeds, maybe.

And then whether or not they just scroll right past it, you know, who knows? We manage some pages with 10,000 followers and on our best day, we're happy if a thousand people see some of these posts. And so that's where you've got to get creative. And, you know, if you can start Facebook groups get way more engagement than Facebook posts.

Facebook events, depending on the event, depending on, you know, if you put a little money with it, the boost, it can, can do pretty well with engagement as well. So, I would encourage you to really Facebook wants you to take advantage of some of those extra features, and when you make Facebook happy, they reward you. Same with Google.

I'd say one other thing that will help with the picture itself. We talked about Lightroom presets and having a unified look. You can even do that with. Like the editing features that are in Facebook or Instagram, a lot of those will let you control the brightness, the exposure the vibrancy, the saturation, those things, you know, play with that for a few minutes to make sure you have a nice, clean, bright picture.

But another thing to think about is the way that you're cropping your picture. It'll be more interesting if you use something that's called the rule of thirds. And if you can imagine on your screen, just drawing a Tic-tac-toe board, if you can place your subject where those lines intersect instead of just in the middle of the screen or all the way to the side or all the way at the top or the bottom where those lines intersect at the cross there, if you can place your subject there.

That's a recipe for a nice-looking picture and that's what I try and think through every time I'm cropping a picture.

 So then finally. Yeah. Make it matter. Think beyond just announcements just posting to post, you know, do ministry outside of just Sunday morning. Yeah. Brady Shearer, a guy who I follow on Instagram and on YouTube has a quote. He says, "if Church only happens in the building, then your reach will miss 80% of your target audience."

People are spending at the most, probably three hours a week with you. If you're lucky and that's considering say an hour for a service on Sunday morning, an hour on Wednesday night, if you have something going on Wednesday night and then an hour in a small group, if they're involved in a small.

And if that's every single week, which honestly is a big assumption because these days people go to Church about once every three weeks, just statistically speaking. But if they come every single week, then you're only influencing about 2.6% of their available time. And that's also considering that they sleep eight hours a night.

So, you know, social media is a huge opportunity for you to be invested in their life to do more than just market yourself, to do more than just market your Church, that you're actually ministering to your community. You can do things like asking how you can be praying for people. You can post encouraging passages.

You can post short, easily digestible devotions. Again, it’s going to sit on your post for a long time, because people are used to scrolling quickly through and reading the captions. So, you know, if you post a devotion or something, just make sure that it's short and sweet, something that can be digested, and under a minute, I will say.

Posting stories that would encourage people to take their next step. Like I mentioned before, if I'm promoting community groups and I do it with a picture of someone or a couple of who's already involved in groups, or I want to promote serving, I'm going to pick a volunteer who I can post a picture of them serving and then have a quote from them about why they love serving and why they love the people they get to serve with.

Jono, you look like you were about to say something.

No, I'm just soaking it all in.

My daughters on her way to take her driver's test. And I noticed that she has five friends with her and just not sure that's going to work out well.

So, at the end of the day, you know, it doesn't matter how many people are following you. It matters how many people are following Jesus through you. If, if you become consumed with just how many followers you gain on social media, how many likes you get on each post? You know, you can fall into that trap pretty easily.

Keeping the goal in mind that these are real people who are trying to connect with us, who are trying to influence, who are trying to help connect to a real God that helps keep things in focus and gives more meaning to what we're doing on social media.

So, the last question and that kind of leads into the last question that I had written down that I wanted to ask you, but just how do you know that your social media for your Church, your ministry, your nonprofit, how do you know that it's successful?

How do you know that it does matter? How can we measure that? It can't be how many people show up on Sunday morning, you know, that's a pretty hard thing to track. And you know, it's not like everyone is saying, Hey, you know, I, I accepted Jesus because of that, that post.

So how do you measure, how do you know that what you're doing is successful? I see this with even like with business owners outside of Church, it's like, they feel good. They didn't measure it and we all do this, but like with our personal social media, we post a picture of our family or whatever.

And, you know, we get 50 likes on it and 20 comments saying how beautiful you are and how good your beard looks or something like that. You know, you're like, Hey, that's good. That's good. I appreciate that. Thank you. Keep the compliments coming. But I don't know that we can necessarily measure the success of our ministry social media, that same way just by feeling good that we got some, some clicks and some likes, what do you think?

Yeah, I think that that would go back to what you decided in the beginning is the goal for your account. So, for instance, for us go for our account is to provide a window into what life is like at journey Church, for the people who are checking us out online. So, I can go back and look at my page and look at the pictures that I've posted and ask myself, okay.

If someone is looking at all of these, would they get an accurate depiction of what it's like to come on Sunday morning? And if the answer is yes, then for me, that's a win. That means it was successful. Now, if your goal for your social media account is to reach people who don't go to your Church like that's your primary focus, then set up some systems to be able to measure that.

Okay. So, on your connection card that people fill out, if they come for the first time on Sunday morning, ask a question, like, how did you hear about us? And if they write, I found you on social media or a friend shared your page on Facebook or something like that, then you're able to track it and you're able to see, okay, here's some measurable proof that what we're doing is working.

Anybody, before we land the plane here, I want to see if anybody's got any last questions kind of coming to the end of our time. Actually, we're a little bit over time. But this has been good stuff and well worth it. And I know that you're all walking away with something valuable.

But I don't want to cut anybody off if you've got any questions, now's the time throw them at us. We're ready.

Zach, do you have any questions for me about how many push-ups I can do?

How many can you do Jono? Not many, not many at all. It's, three, if I use my knees.

So, you mentioned connection cards. Are you using them ready? Randy said they're using a QR code and it's not working. What would you say to that? I'm assuming people aren't filling them out.

The connection card that we're using, we're not using a physical connection card at Journey. We're using, you point your phone at the screen, and that takes you to the online connection card. Randy's saying, yeah, people just aren't filling them out. People aren't responding. How do you feel that it's working at journey are people who are filling those out?

Are we incentivizing it?

People are filling them out. There are different things that will encourage people to fill them out. One is just making sure that you have it as many places as possible. You know, if you have the ability to put a sticker or a card on every chair that has that QR code, so they don't have to lift it up and point it at the screen and say, do that.

We definitely put it on the screen for our broadcast feed. It comes up as a lower third on the bottom of the screen and people can see. Then when people scan that QR code, it goes to our Linktree account, which allows us to put multiple links. And one of those links, the very first link actually is the connection card.

Now, the way that you talk about it matters. And so, we always try and talk about our connection card in a way that makes it important for people to fill it out. So, we say, and this is the way that you communicate with us. If you want more information about our Church, you need to fill out the communication card.

If you have a prayer request, you need to fill out the communication card. That's how you get those to us. Instead of framing it in a way that we want your information, so fill out the card. You need to say it in a way that makes them want to fill out the card for their own reasons.

And make it to where, yeah, if you want to be in the loop and you want to know what's going on, you know, you need to click this, you need to check out the QR code because there's also not only is that where the connection card is, but that's where the information that if you want to sign your kids up for kid's camp, like that's, that's where you're going to have to go.

So, if, if we hold their hands and hand them a flyer and everybody's sending out an email about it, like, I think that goes back to kind of having the website as your central hub. And if you want to stay in the loop, then you got to be on the list if you want. I know in our connection card too, there's prayer requests.

And so, I think a lot of people fill out the connection card, really just for the sake of, I mean, they've been coming for years, but they want you to pray for something. So, I think the prayer requests aspect probably drives up a little bit of engagement there too. So, a couple other questions. Do you suggest that the pastor or the pastors, the staff, the ministerial staff, should they be the ones making the videos to encourage or versus just a typical post?

Should there be some videos from the pastor versus just somebody just posting stuff, you know, just posting pictures of events in your congregation?

Yeah. I think that can be helpful. We do that often with Ken. We just try and always make sure that it's short, like less than a minute, whatever he's got to say or encourage people to do we just try and make sure that it's succinct and attention grabbing.

You may have to forget that you're a pastor for a minute and take off the pastor hat.

I remember in seminary, in my preaching class, there were like, he was always like, if you can't say it in five minutes, you don't need to be preaching.

If you can't say, what you're trying to say in five minutes, we've failed.

That reminds me though about the QR code. It also matters where in the service you're promoting it, and we try and do it somewhere close to the beginning, because most of our people will fill them out during the sermon.

So just keep that in mind, if you're saving your announcement for the QR code or the communication card for the end, nobody's filling that out because they're leaving.

The best QR generator. Eric said they'd use one built into Google Chrome browser.

Any other better options? I always use the one the Bitly, they've got one that you can use. The reason I like the Bitly one is, one, it's forever. I don't know about the Google Chrome one, if, I mean some of the ones, some of them expire.

But the other thing I like about the Bitly one is you can put your logo in the middle of the QR code, just for a little extra branding there, and you may can do that with the Google Chrome one. But I know with Bitly, you can do that.

Zach hand draws his QR codes. Zach is also a really good artist and yeah, we tattoo the QR codes on the staff, and it's right below their chip. And so no, you've got a better option.

I use QR-code-generator.com. It's free unless you purchase, what's called a dynamic QR code.

And that just means that it's the same code, but you can change where it goes whenever you want. So, for instance, we have a dynamic QR code for our Linktree, and so we can constantly change our Linktree, and it will not change the QR code so we can continue to use that same QR code on all our print material and on the screen and stuff.

But we can tell it to go wherever we want. Because it's a dynamic code and not a static code.

I think that's a good way to do it. Otherwise, you're going to have to have 47 QR codes for every link, you know, you're going to have a children's ministry QR code. So, if you haven't already figured it out, Linktree is a good option there.

And my camera froze again. That means it's time to end this webinar. Or for me to buy a new camera, I'm not sure. There's a GoFundMe set up for my webinar camera.

Eric wrote Zach's artisanal QR codes on Etsy. You could sell those. That would be great.

Let's see. Do you text, do you text that stuff out? Do you text out the QR codes and the announcements and stuff like that?

We put it on as much as possible. So, if we have, for instance, last Christmas season, we sent a postcard to everyone who has every, every family group that has been to our Church.

In the past two years, we sent a postcard that had our Christmas schedule on it. So, it said when our Christmas Eve services were, when the children's program was anything that related to the Christmas season was on there. And then the QR code was also on there so that people can scan that and have the latest.

And I think that this is kind of maybe out of the weeds from social media, but I think that's a cool idea. It's something Zach does. It's something we do for our clients. You know, when it's those big times of year Easter or Christmas, or you know, kids camp, things like that. We'll build out a specific landing page on the website.

That's all about, you know, Journey Christmas and even buy the domain, you know, journeyvbs.com and build a page. That's all about that. And just brand it that way. And so, you know, I would encourage you to build out, you know, get your web guy to build out some specific pages for those bigger events and use the QR code so that you can direct them not to a homepage full of 48 other events that they've got to scroll through to find.

And you haven't had time to update it. You know, here you are in February and your Thanksgiving service times are still on the website. So, you know, build out those home pages. I think a good idea. And get Linktree. Any other questions before we wind this thing down?

What are your thoughts on other social media platforms, other than Facebook and Instagram example like Twitter or even TikTok, do you think they're worth investing time in?

I'll answer to the Twitter. I would say no, unless the Pastor has a good following.

But the only people who are successful on Twitter are people who are always on, and who engage if you want to be successful on Twitter which has kind of turned into a big dumpster fire of political garbage for the most part, I mean a lot of arguing. But the people who are effective on Twitter are kind of the head figures, the leadership, and they engage pretty regularly. But I don't know that many of our people in our Churches are actively engaging in Twitter.

Now, TikTok. On the other hand. Zach, how much time you spend on TikTok?

0%.

Okay. Well, if you ever do, do you have a TikTok?

I don't have a TikTok.

I have a TikTok. And it's like, if you're a graphic designer, you, you know how, like you can, if you go into Photoshop and you've been working on like a logo or something, and it's been an hour and a half and you're, and you've just been deciding on a font, like, it just sucks you in like that TikTok is the same way, man, TikTok's dangerous, in more ways than one.

But just from as far as a time a time waste. Oh my gosh. There are some funny people in there. However, I mean, Facebook did not lose $252 billion last week due to LinkedIn competition. They lost that and Zuckerberg even blamed TikTok for that 25% loss of their overall value in a day.

So TikTok is where a ton of people are. It's where your adults are. Definitely where teenagers are. So, I think we definitely lean towards redeeming those things, meeting students where they're at and, and being on there, being funny, just having fun with it to get students' attention.

It's not, you know, you got to have somebody, you've got to be consistent on there and you got to be careful on there. But I think getting in on some of the more fun family-friendly trends, just some of the silliness, you know, get some of your students in on that and producing some TikToks I think would be fun.

I think that, you know, your students perhaps may share those with other students, so definitely could get you some exposure. So, if your leadership's cool with it and, you don't catch a lot of flak. I think for student ministry, I think TikTok, and maybe even an adult ministry or like a Church wide TikTok, if you've got a younger congregation. Zach, thought?

I default to you on this, because like I said, I don't even have a TikTok.

I know that as popular, but I've never signed up for one. It seems to me like people use TikTok like how people used to use or maybe still use YouTube, just like searching funny videos. It would be difficult, I think for a Church to have a purposeful tic talk, but you know, I, haven't given a lot of thought to that.

Yeah, I do too. I think, I mean, it is designed for, you know, for fun, for the most part. I mean, there are some guys on there that are, you know, like self-help coaches or psychologists and stuff like that, they give tips. That tends to, you know, they go, well, if that's their niche, or if that's their, their shtick but for the most part, the teenagers are on there just to laugh and, and goof off.

And so, I don't think it would be bad to have a presence on there in front of your teenagers. But it definitely would be a tougher one to make matter. Whereas I think with Instagram you've still got, you've got the Reels feature and Reels are getting a lot more engagement on Instagram than just a typical post.

So, if you're not doing reels and you have anything to do with the student ministry Instagram, or really any Instagram account with your Church, I would encourage you to start testing Reels up against your regular posts. And you'll see you get a lot more engagement from that just because Facebook or Instagram wants you to, they know their competition is TikTok.

So, they're going to reward you by posting Reels because that's going to help them compete with TikTok. So, I would certainly, if nothing else do Reels. That's all I have to say about that.

I've found on Instagram in particular, if you, or someone else on your staff, whoever's handling, handling your social media. If they have the time to do it, anytime the Instagram introduces a new feature, they prioritize it over all of the others.

Just so that people will use it. So that's a top way to get your name out quickly.

So, jump on that. Sorry. I'm getting all choked up here, talking about TikTok for a second.

All right. Well, Zach, thank you so much. I hope this has been valuable for everyone. I know when we talk about this sometimes it's overwhelming and I just say this to everybody. This is not some huge sales pitch or a bait and switch, but I know that there are a lot of Churches that you hear all this stuff and it's like, oh man, that sounds awesome.

I would love to do that. I know we need to improve our social media. I know we need to improve our website. I know we need to show up on Google better. But we're a small staff and we've got a lot of responsibilities. We don't have time to do. Faithworks, that's what we do. Our goal is to help you and whether that's giving away free, valuable content and a webinar.

Awesome. There is so much that you can do on your own without paying someone like us to come in and help with that. And I highly encourage you to do that. Be good stewards of the money that you have there at the Church. But we're here to come in and take some of that off of your plate and relieve the pressure.

So, you can focus on what you do best. So, if you do need help with social media, you're thinking, Hey we, we want to improve things. We just don't have the time or the staff or the resources. And you're like, you want to talk? You can go to faithworks.link/discovery, and you, and I one-on-one, we can take about 20 minutes.

I'll answer any questions you have, or you shoot me an email or shoot a text or call whatever works for you. I don't think we have a fax number, and I threw away my pager. So don't, don't do that. But get in touch. We'd love to talk to you and help you in any way we can. If you ever have questions about anything, we're not going to charge you. If you're ever stuck on something, you can try and figure something out on social media, or you're looking for a resource, man, just reach out.

It won't be a sales call. I will help you in any way I can and give you every bit of knowledge that I have, and it's not much. If I can't get you an answer, I'll get you in touch with somebody who can. So, if we can ever help you let us know and we're here for you. Again, thanks Zach for your time.

Thank you, guys, for all hanging out with us. Hopefully you have enjoyed it. And we're going to do these monthly and we'll have a new guest every month talking about a new topic every month. And so, make sure you watch out for those emails, we'll be sending you, keeping you in the loop and thanks again.

We appreciate you all talk to you soon.