Churches are in the thick of the holiday season this Thanksgiving time, but it is already time to be thinking of the Advent season. Why not jump on your social media strategy for December? Just recovering from your turkey coma? We have ten tips for your church on how you can connect effectively this Christmas season.
- Schedule out The fact is that the whole church is going to be very busy this Christmas season, this includes the church tech group. To help alleviate this, consider scheduling out your social media posts. I recommend doing it directly because Facebook penalizes third-party apps, but Twitter and Facebook both have this built-in to their web app.
- Warm wishes from staff Create a video of 15-20 second clips where the church leadership, paid staff, lead volunteers, and church elders or other appointed positions give warm regards to the congregation, community, and world. Offer up words of hope, grace, and prayer as you create this video that will be online for the whole world to see.
- Stream the service I never get tired of saying this, use Google+ with your church’s G+ page and stream the Christmas, Christmas Eve, and even New Years service for those that might have traveled to be with friends and family. This allows others to still be engaged if they cannot find another church to worship with.
- Run a Facebook Ad Has your church experimented with Facebook Ads before? If not, now is the perfect time to reach out to those in your local area and engage with them to attend a service. Between Easter and Christmas, these are two high visitor days that you should be capitalizing on. Use the ability to target friends of friends as well as location specific areas. At the same time, this is probably where your ads are best served as impressions and not CPC (cost per click). Need more help running a Facebook Ad this Christmas? We’d love to help you get the most bang for your buck.
- Use the geo location aspect of Graph Search Whether you are in a big city or small community, you probably want to know what is going on with events you can collaborate on, attend, or promote. Facebook’s Graph Search allows you to show off posts that have been shared and are within your area. Use it to look up exclusively congregation-specific or a bigger reach of the whole community.
- Live tweet the service Live tweeting is okay, having a whole group of volunteers and staff that are sharing their favorite Bible verses shared, quotes from the pastor, as well as key points from the sermon is a great way to not only show off your church’s Sunday service, but even a form of digital evangelism.
- Post all illustration and promotional videos I see more videos, graphics, and illustrations done during this season than any other time within the church. Record them, show them off on Sundays, and then post them online for everyone to see again or for the first time.
- Wish every congregation member a merry Christmas You have the ability to login to Facebook as your church page or simply use your church’s Twitter account. Sign in and personally leave a post on all of the people you can to wish them a happy holiday season. Ensure that you are being authentic, though you can definitely copy/paste parts of the message to be more effective.
- Crowdsourced Instagram video of church leaders singing a Christmas tune I love this idea of asking leaders and volunteers to create an Instagram video, connect it with a hashtag that is connected to your church, and then have a church media leader collect them all into a single video to post on your own account as well as show it off in 2014.
- 25 days of Christmas with photos I love the 25 days of Christmas videos on ABD Family and why not recreate it for your church? Post great photos of your congregation and leadership in action. Do not have great photos? Start now and grab sweet pictures to show off to your fans and followers.
What do you plan to be doing this Christmas on social media?
Stacy Uden says
Be careful about encouraging streaming (item 3) without some background. You will get churches in a heap of trouble with content owners. You need special rights for music, prayers, and other content any time that content leaves the 4 walls of a church (I.e., putting on the Internet, recording to a CD, etc). It’s not as simple as “get a webcam and set up G+/Ustream/etc.”
seventy8Productions says
I totally agree, though I would state that no streaming at all is just as silly and would encourage churches to at least stream their sermons every Sunday.
kolby milton says
We are going to use facebook to promote events this christmas. We also built a custom website to highlight the christmas outreach. I love the idea of a video wishing everyone merry christmas. I am going to do that for my youth ministry. Awesome ideas like usual.
seventy8Productions says
Would love to see it if you do it!
Kevin Norvell says
Great ideas, as usual.
This year we produced an Advent Devotional Video Series, posting a new video devotional each evening at 7:30 on Facebook.
It’s been lots of work, but we’ve seen some very positive feedback from both members and visitors.
You can see the videos on our Facebook page at http://Facebook.com/IBCCorbin
Jeremy says
Thanks for the share!