ChurchMag is undergoing some changes with our social media strategy. If you haven’t read, here is why. Last article, I shared about making changes that are evidence-based, not just by other research people, but by us too.
This article, I will be going over what we have finalized as our social media strategy. Keep in mind that we have to develop the processes, manpower, and workflows to implement this strategy, but the goal has been set. That being said, we are in a transition, so do not expect perfection right away.
One statistic I did not share with you was the percentage of incoming traffic via social media versus search. Right now we are running at 59% and 23% from social media with the rest being via direct or other traffic. Our goal is to improve that percentage by doubling our social media traffic. Here’s how.
What Platforms Are We On?
We currently have a significant portion of our social media traffic from Facebook without trying. That changes now as we can and will capitalize on our presence.
- We will discuss this more below, but advertisements will be a key integration.
- Re-purposing content is important. We are currently creating a process of at least one article, freshly released or from the archives, shared via quote images.
- Facebook Live is a new and untapped platform is important for us to investigate. We have a couple of ideas, but want to play with this more.
- Actually decrease our frequency of posting. The redundant posts are decreasing our visibility overall within the Facebook algorithm. If you don’t know what that means, we will expand upon that further later. Short version, posting the same thing over and over via a 3rd party post actually greatly hurts all of your posts’ frequency.
Pinterest is always this dark horse that no one takes seriously. “It’s for women who like to buy stuff” or “You need to have infographics to get traffic.” But that’s simply not true and a very basic social media strategy on Pinterest can garner thousands of views a day. We are going to shoot for so much more.
- The repurposed quote images from Facebook will be uses more and more.
- Featured images are going to have branding all of the time and created for more shareability.
- Our descriptors are going to be more complex but intentional with links, brief content from the article, and appropriate attributions.
Twitter is going to stay mainly as it is. What you read in the previous article is going to be what happens.
- Six retweets a day.
- Two unique posts towards content on the site.
- Automation is a must. (See more below)
This medium has me excited for many reasons. First and foremost, it has a huge audience that is not been impacted by church and parachurch organizations. Secondly, other social media networks like SnapChat, Instagram video, and Periscope are all video mediums that require similar skills you will need to do YouTube successfully. This takes a specific mentality to prepare for, execute, and edit your videos.
- Post one to two videos a week.
- Create at least one promotional video a quarter to increase engagement with videos.
- Update all data and links in videos.
Content Creation
Have a good strategy is easy to say, harder to do when you need to create the content that is going to be posted. The content needs to be created via several team members with a workflow that makes it consistent and high quality.
Automation
Automation is not the enemy, but mindless automation can destroy your digital presence. We will use this for sure, but it will be thoughtful and not something that is scheduled one time and left to run for weeks or months.
Advertisements
Advertisements are something we have not yet done, but which I have experience and know the full value. We won’t do ads to increase traffic though, that means very little. We want to maximize what can result from it, whether going to ChurchMag.Press or getting sign-ups for our newsletter. We will be very intentional about it.
What does your social media strategy look like?
We’d like to compare notes.
[Catan image via Stuart Borrett via Compfight cc]
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