You know you should be doing more with your company’s social media, but when would you find the time? And, where would you start?
After all, you don’t have a whole team of marketers to dedicate to your social media presence, and for many it is likely maintained by a designer in your office who happens to have a passion for keeping it current.
As a designer you are producing content all the time—however, you might not be fully leveraging it for social media.
This article outlines a simple social media strategy for church designers designed for maximum engagement without a ton of billable hours. Start by finding a platform your clients are actually using.
Take a look at your top 10 clients and find out where the decision-makers are active online. Not the main church accounts, but the actual people with whom you do business. This litmus test of looking for your top 10 clients (or target future clients) will help you identify the social media platform where you want to focus your efforts. (It will also let you know if your clients are using social media at all.)
By identifying your clients' preferred social media platforms, you can focus on them and let the rest slide. For sure you will want to grab your company’s name and build a profile on all the platforms, but you only need to be active on the one or two that your clients use the most.
Identify your clients’ aspirations and frustrations
Most people in church leadership have an aspiration for deeply connecting with people. And their frustrations? Well, most are frustrated by anything that keeps them from connecting. But that’s a generalization.
Tracking the social media feeds of the church leadership you would like to work with will quickly reveal in detail what it is that they care most about, so that you can make sure that any content you create will be directly relevant to them.
All of us are scanners of content by nature. It takes more than “slightly interesting” to make us click. And the content with the highest appeal? It typically has to do with our goals, desires, fears, and frustrations. Zeroing in our content on these things ensures value to the people we create it for because it either meets a direct need or helps us get to where we want to go.
If church designers have little patience with things that waste their time, church leadership even more so. Create content that makes their lives easier and their dreams more accessible.
Five easy places to find content
As a designer you are producing content all the time—however, you might not be fully leveraging it for social media. Here are five places to look.
- Narrative and imagery for a design solution that solves a specific problem common to churches.
- Photos of newly opened projects. (We are all curious about what our neighbor’s house looks like inside.)
- Content from a presentation that you’ve given at a conference. (You can also turn this into a series of blog posts.)
- Creative ideas that will save churches time or money. (Because a lack of those two resources can be a universal frustration.)
- Perspective on how design thinking can solve problems outside of the built environment. (Designers think differently about solving problems. Share your skill.)
You can post your content directly to your social media platforms, or for longer pieces, post to your website. Having a blog on your site is often the easiest way to do this and has the added benefit of bringing traffic back to your site when you post the link. Another maximizing strategy? Posts on Twitter that have images get 9x better engagement than those without.
Need to put words like the name of a project or a photographer credit on a photo before posting but don’t have image editing software? Canva.com makes it simple to create graphics for social media quickly.
Automate to save time and cover additional platforms
Since you’ve identified your optimal social media platform by finding out where your clients are, you will focus on posting there. However, you can also use automation tools like Buffer or
Hootsuite to post to multiple platforms at once, allowing the sites you aren’t focused on to “come along for the ride.”
These automation tools also allow you to schedule many posts at once to roll out over a timeline so that you don’t have to focus on your social media efforts every day. These tools also tend to improve continuity created because you post in batches.
Build your network
Building your company’s social network is essential if you want anyone to see what you post. No matter what it is called—connections on LinkedIn, followers on Twitter, friends on Facebook, or circles on Google+—building your network works a lot more like it does face-to-face than it does in advertising or broadcasting. While good content is a prerequisite to get any following at all, you can reach out to others directly by commenting on their content, doing shoutouts, and using social shares to build engagement.
Another effective practice? Request connection with the people you meet at conferences and meetings. It can turn casual connections into actual engagement over time.
Monitor and respond
Just like it would be unthinkable for a business to put a phone line and then never answer it, it is a terrible idea to automate your social media efforts and not interact.
Focusing on one or two platforms improves your response time when working with a limited staff. It also quickly reveals which content people engage with so you know what to post more of and which efforts to abandon.
After all, you have clients to engage with face to face. Not all of your efforts will be online, so it makes sense to focus your time on what is most effective.
