Social media has been called the modern town square. Open for business 24x7, the fast moving channels of news, personal communications, and entertainment, are where the so-called ‘influencers’ are to be found. Anything and everything is there from miracle weight loss plans to kitchen gadgets to DIY car repair. Most likely, the voice of your church is there, too, but is it getting the attention it deserves? What content producers are finding is that video, and specifically video produced to fit a particular social media platform, can make all the difference.
The most basic guidelines for successful social media might be as simple as know your platform, and know your audience.
Understand social media strategies
With all the activity and distractions online, it’s easy for your message to be lost in the bustle of the social media ‘town square.’ Your content must not only hit your target audience by grabbing the viewer’s attention, but to count, it must elicit a response from your viewers with ‘likes’, ‘clicks’, ‘shares’, and ‘follows’. The term ‘engagement’ does a good job of describing that to be successful in social media your posts must help you build a relationship with your viewers–you get to know them as they get to know your church. While video has proven to be the best tool to grab and retain the attention of social media viewers, it only works in concert with a good social media strategy.
Dave Clark, Media Pastor and Director at Fellowship Church in Dallas, TX, shares, “The first step in our social media strategy was understanding the difference between social media advertising and the kind of marketing that encourages engagement.”
“The first step in our social media strategy,” says Dave Clark, Media Pastor and Director at Fellowship Church in Dallas, TX, “was understanding the difference between social media advertising and the kind of marketing that encourages engagement.” Clark likens advertising to what most churches have been doing forever. “We want to advertise events that we want people to come to,” he says. “Advertising is along the lines of what you might see in a church bulletin or weekly announcements.” Marketing, he offers, is more akin to storytelling and builds that engagement with people you make contact with on social media. “Creating more story-oriented content with human elements like laughter and energy and describing who your pastor is and what people feel in church is harder than advertising,” he says, “but that is what goes viral.”
The good news, Clark reminds us, is that storytelling on social media lets you “get away with something less polished.” Clark maintains that even though live production techniques available to many churches can produce video with a finished, polished look to compete with TV or movies, we see that many influencers are successful with content shot on an iPhone or GoPro. “With the entry level being less gear intensive, it is easier for people to get started with video. Of course, you can still leverage technology, but you don’t need a lot to get started marketing your church on social media.”
Each platform is special
The most basic guidelines for successful social media might be as simple as know your platform, and know your audience. Each platform has its own style and keeping up with a platform is important because trends change and new features are added all the time. As a result, the audience on each major platform is different. So, what is working on Facebook might be a total flop over on TikTok. Likewise, what works for baby boomers might be a total miss for millennials.
There are important technical and stylistic differences between social media platforms that should influence how your church approaches them. “For one thing, there are markedly different age groups and audiences for each platform,” notes Clark. “We are constantly learning and keeping up with the platforms–keeping up with releases and new features, trying to determine what their particular ‘magic’ is, and getting a feel for the algorithms that can help or hurt us. It’s a bit of a dance.” The key, Clark says, is to be proactive and keep learning.
Knowing how social media platforms differ can help you decide which one or what combination of platforms fits with your target audience. Facebook users, for example, will tend to be older and the layout caters to a wide 16:9 format. So video produced in a format for television or film tends to do well, whereas a student ministry might lean toward Instagram where a shorter, tighter, production in portrait mode would play better. “Instagram is a younger audience,” notes Clark, “Unlike Facebook, the platform is kind of an endless scroll, so the object is to catch them before they scroll on. Keeping your video short, tight and punchy works for that.”
Like Instagram, Twitter is fast-paced and is described as a ‘microblogging service’ where members broadcast short posts called tweets. Twitter members can broadcast tweets and follow other users' tweets or join special groups with members with common interest. Twitter is all about reaching your audience quickly, so text does well, but you can embed video, and post images, but the focus is on groups and communication.
Twitter might work well for a pastor to reach out with ideas about your church, but if you want people to appreciate a longer video or a complex topic, YouTube provides another larger format video sharing platform. “Longer format videos tend to do better on YouTube,” says Clark, “where Watch Time and other tracking data can get your content more exposure and improve your ranking.”
Clark’s church is not yet on TikTok, an even faster-moving platform for creating, sharing and discovering short videos. With its own trend-setting style and video/graphic editing apps, the platform is very much becoming the outlet for young creators to express themselves through singing, dancing, comedy, and lip-syncing. “We’re watching TikTok,” he says, “but haven’t opened that door.”
Advice for producing for social media
Briauna Hankins, Filmmaker and Editor along with her team at Faith Promise Church, Knoxville, TN, offers this advice for filmmakers and creatives producing video for social media: “First, identify your why and your who,” she says. “Why are you creating this content–what are you trying to move forward for your church? Then, who is your target audience?” Hankins has also found that it is important to think about who you may be currently reaching, too. “We realized that we were creating content largely for a younger audience on social media,” she recalls. “However, the audience that we actually reach, and that makes up our congregation, is young families. With that new audience in mind, we shifted our focus to more family-oriented content with additional focus on kids content.”
Briauna Hankins, Filmmaker and Editor along with her team at Faith Promise Church, Knoxville, TN, offers this advice for filmmakers and creatives producing video for social media: “First, identify your why and your who.”
Hankins is currently working on developing a set process to help support posting weekly content. “We use a social media posting app called Loomly to keep track of our efforts,'' she says, “and I am in all of our series meetings which helps me know how we can incorporate video content about them in social media.” For each series a graphic designer creates social media thumbnails that tie into the branding of our series, as well as Reels templates to make the video recaps feel more cohesive with the rest of our feeds. Similarly, the team is working on repackaging previously-created video content for reuse by matching it up with social media formats.
Just as Clark reminded us to keep an eye on new features and changes to platforms, emerging trends in content and content creation are also changing how video on social media looks and works. “Content creation is more accessible for most people with TikTok and other new video/graphic editing apps,” says Hankins. “More than ever, there is an influx of content, all more interesting and exciting than the last. So, being aware of the trends, and styles is very important especially with video content pushing towards more interesting, innovative, and attention grabbing content. With that in mind, we are working through how we can incorporate what we’ve learned from social media when we are planning our series, video shoots, and graphics.“
