Has the Church overlooked YouTube?
Posting updates on Facebook and Twitter and throwing in an image or two now and again requires far less ‘know-how’ and technical requirements, whereas producing a video to upload onto YouTube has a far more drastic learning curve for most churches. Perhaps that is why so many churches don’t utilize YouTube when it comes to the different social media platforms.
Here’s how the different social networks stack up in ROAR’s Social Media in Church Survey:
What Platforms are Churches Using?
No surprises, really.
Even if you counted all the churches using Google+ and those marked as ‘Other,’ YouTube is falling far behind compared to where it should be registering. Like I said before, the platforms most churches are using have little to no learning curve and demand far less of a time investment.
However, just because a social network like YouTube requires a greater investment, doesn’t mean it isn’t worth it.
YouTube — A ‘Digital Mission Field?’
According to Sean Cannell — author of YouTube For Churches: How to Make Better Videos, Grow Your Church and Reach More People with YouTube — says that, “YouTube is the most underrated and underutilized social network by church leaders and churches,” and I tend to agree.
When you consider that behind Google, YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, the Church is missing a huge opportunity to be found in those searches. Again, Cannell builds a strong case for churches to invest in YouTube:
“Using the YouTube Keyword Tool you easily can discover some of these questions. “Is God Real?” is searched 25,200 times a month. “Is Jesus God?” 50,000. The solo term “God” is searched over 5.3 million times a month! People are looking for answers to life’s biggest questions on the same website they watch viral cat videos on.”
Why hasn’t your church started using YouTube?
I would imagine the first question that needs to be answered after making the decision to move on to YouTube, is what should your church be uploading to YouTube. Please, please, don’t read this post and think: “Let’s put our sermons on YouTube!” That’s not what people are searching for.
Perhaps Sean — the Church YouTube expert — can help get a grasp at this
Chandos says
The main reason we don’t use YouTube is the lack of control you have. (Some of this may be outdated naivety on my part) Too much is out of control with what videos are recommended, comment moderation, videos posted in response to…etc. We don’t have the staff or volunteer base to effectively monitor comments, so we’d have to turn them off, which to me sends the negative message of “We don’t want to hear what you have to say.”
We also have the issue of lacking the staff to create content to put online. The main videos we have on our Vimeo channel are our messages. If I had a full production team to help me make new content, we’d probably consider it.
Eric Dye says
What size is your church?
Chandos says
Somewhere around 1500 or so.
Eric Dye says
Wow. That’s a decent size. I would think there would be someone/s who would be interested in producing some creative video content.
Dan says
I thoroughly agree that we need to be engaging more and more with YouTube. The future of television really could be Youtube and other on demand services. If we don’t start to produce good content now, we may soon be flooded out by lots of other videos which don’t answer the questions people have.
The organisation myself and my brother have set up in the UK, called The Chorus, aims as part of our mission to engage young people through media so we have started a YouTube channel which has a mixture of Christian based videos ranging from comical things to serious short videos. We would love to get the message out more, so would welcome new subscribers and supporters of our channel. http://www.YouTube.com/wearethechorus
Thanks!
Dan
Eric Dye says
Cool, let me check it out!
Dan says
Cheers Eric!