There are a lot of misconceptions about social media and its place in the Church. If you’re still trying to figure out your
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“Creating a Facebook account just seemed like something we should do.”
“There’s a lot of pressure from church leaders to post about upcoming events.”
“I’m not sure social media is worth our staff spending time and resources on.”
Any of these sound familiar?
There are a lot of misconceptions about social media and its place in the Church. If you’re still trying to figure out your church’s social media, this blog post is for you. We’re going to cover the foundations of social media for churches, the basics that will inform your social media strategy moving forward.
Before you write your next post, ask yourself these 4 questions.
According to Pew Research Center, over 80% of adults in the US are on at least one social media platform.
Part of being the Church is meeting people where they’re at.
Just as Jesus met the Samaritan woman at the well, or Matthew at his tax booth, or the fishermen in their boats, we—as the hands and feet of Jesus—need to go where people are.
And nowadays, most people are online.
Digital tools like social media and your church’s website are opportunities to reach people wherever they are on a massive scale.
By not having a social media presence, you would be cutting off an avenue of communication with your community and making it more difficult for new guests to find you.
If your goal is to meet people where they’re at (and it should be), here are the platforms your audience is most likely to be on:
YouTube is especially popular with Gen Alpha, and TikTok is most popular with Gen Z. Facebook and Instagram are the go-to apps for Gen X and Millennials, respectively (Pew Research Center).
Don’t try to manage more social media accounts than you can handle. It’s better to be active on 2 platforms than to post sporadically on 6.
At GraceLed, we recommend posting regularly on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Those 4 might sound like a lot of work, but you can repurpose the same content across some or all of them (more on that later).
You might want a LinkedIn account for your staff to mark their jobs, but you don’t need to post there. Don’t worry about X, Pinterest, Reddit, or any other social media platform, either.
In the early days of social media, posts varied more from platform to platform. Now, short-form video dominates on almost every platform.
If you’re already recording your sermons each week, this is great news for you—you have a built-in source of video content to share with your audience!
You can take the same sermon clips and post them as reels to Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. (This is called cross-posting.) If you keep those clips limited to 60 seconds, you can also cross-post them as YouTube shorts. You can also cross-post images and captions on Facebook and Instagram.
Use photos that show your church in action: your worship services, church members chatting and laughing together, members doing ministry in your community. Someone who finds your church through social media should get a good idea of what kind of church you are.
Text-only posts tend not to perform very well, and they’re only viable on Facebook. Try to keep those to a minimum.
A healthy church social media page contains a lot of video and photos of the church in action, and a few graphics.
There are 3 primary audiences for your church’s social media:
But if you look at the average church social media profile, you’ll notice that a lot of churches only post for their members, usually reminding them of upcoming events.
The result is that social media turns into a digital bulletin board, rather than a tool for reaching, encouraging, and ministering to your community.
Posts that advertise an event and increase awareness aren’t bad—but they are just a fraction of what social media can do.
Show potential guests what your church is like by posting images or videos of your worship services. Encourage your members by sharing powerful clips from your most recent sermon. Raise awareness of needs in your church, like a donation drive or special offering. When your congregation is active in the community, celebrate it with stories and images.
When you post to social media with all 3 of these audiences in mind, and with a variety of post types, you’ll give your followers a more complete picture of who your church is.
