Is it ever okay to NOT be on a social media platform? Rather than trying to hop on the latest trend, or even simply staying afloat with your current profiles, maybe it's time to evaluate where you need to be in the social media realm. In today's discussion, we discuss what you need to know about the platforms your church ought to consider utilizing, plus how to determine when it's right for your church to use a social media channel, stay on that platform, and when it's okay to leave.
Jeanette:
Are you overwhelmed with all of the social media platforms? Are you worried your church isn't on the right ones? Or maybe you've hopped into every new social media platform and trend that there is only to discover you really don't know what you're doing there in the first place. I know I've been there. On today's episode, we discuss why you might not need to be on social media and how to tell when you should.
Bryan:
Hey, friends. Welcome to another episode of The Church Juice Podcast. Whatever your title or role is at your church, this show is created as a way to give you the communication tools, resources, and community that you need to be successful. I'm Bryan Haley, the host of the podcast, and I'm joined by my incredible co-host, Jeanette Yates, and we are here, as always, what are we doing, Jeanette?
Jeanette:
We're energizing church communications.
Bryan:
That's right.
Jeanette:
That's right. That's my favorite thing that you say every week. It just makes me smile, which it should, because we're energizing church communications.
Bryan:
Good.
Jeanette:
Speaking of smiling, I'm really excited about today's topic because, first of all, I really love social media, and second of all, we're just kind of brainstorming and just kind of knocking our heads together a little bit about when too much is too much and when it's not enough.
Bryan:
That's true, yeah.
Jeanette:
And so for those of us who love social media, we always are eager to talk about, and we do that on this podcast, we talk about all the different ways to incorporate social media into your strategy. We talk about how to build that community online, all that kind of stuff. But we want to take a moment to talk about whether or not we should or need to. So that's what we'll be doing today.
Bryan:
Yeah, like you were just saying, we talk a lot about how to be on social media well, but we never really, I don't think at least, talk much about when not to be on social media. Do we need to be early adopters? Because there are tons of platforms out there and not all of them last either. You got Vine, you got Clubhouse, which I think still exists, so when we know when is the time to jump on or when is the time to bail? Jeanette and I, we're going to talk about that a little bit today, so I'm excited about the conversation. I think we probably have more questions than answers, but it's a discussion and I'm excited to see where it goes.
Jeanette:
Yeah, this is one of those we'll be interested, well, we're interested always in hearing everybody's feedback, but this will be a great one for the Facebook group too. Let's talk about this.
Bryan:
Absolutely, right. So let's talk a little bit about when do we know, or when should a church leader know when not to be on a platform? Obviously, there are tons of platforms, right?
Jeanette:
Right.
Bryan:
There are tons of social media outlets that a church could be on, but when does a church decide to not be on one? When do I make that intentional decision to not be on a Twitter or a Facebook or Instagram, or you mentioned one that I've never even heard of, BeReal.
Jeanette:
BeReal.
Bryan:
When do we make that intentional decision, I guess? What's your thought?
Jeanette:
Well, so first of all, I think it does need to be an intentional decision. I think it is something that you need to evaluate. Now, if you've never heard of it, chances are your audience hasn't either. So don't worry about it if somebody mentions it in passing. Like, Bryan, you don't need to go out on BeReal, because apparently none of your friends are.
Bryan:
I mean, I might.
Jeanette:
But I think, so one thing is to be, do have an intentional decision making process and kind of go through that. But one of the things that sparked this interest in having this conversation with you, Bryan, is I was having this conversation with my friend Tyler Harden, who I know through social media, but he works with churches. He's a fellow church communicator like we are, and he actually was saying that he had been working with some churches that they weren't on Facebook yet, and they were trying to do that. And his point was let's take a break and think about this first. And I thought, you know what? That's a good word. Let's talk about that more. So this idea of being intentional and thinking about it, that's the thing. And then the first thing I think you want to do, and again, this is something we probably say most episodes, but you really need to know who your audience is first of all.
So if you don't know that, we probably have a podcast we can link to about figuring out who your audience is, and that is not only who is your current congregation or community that you serve, but also who you're trying to serve. Know that audience, and then where are they? Because you want to go where they are. So I think when you're trying to make the decision about do I? There are churches still not on Facebook, or maybe you are on Facebook, but there's been some talk of whether or not to join Instagram, especially now that through the Meta Business Manager, you can connect the two and it's easy.
Bryan:
Yeah.
Jeanette:
"Oh, should we just add this, since we can do it easily?" Okay, before you do that, let's see, "Do we have any reason to go over there and be on that, or is our audience all just here on Facebook and that's where we need to focus?" So I think that's one thing. Have you had that kind of experience with new platforms as they come up? Maybe not Facebook and Instagram, but has that happened with the churches that you've worked with, Bryan?
Bryan:
One thing that I hear a lot, I guess, is churches trying to hop on a platform because they are an older church that is, let's just say 65 and older is their church demographic, but they want young families. So they hop on Instagram because they want to be where those people are, but then they don't know how to use it, and because their current audience isn't there, they're not using it either. So it's kind of setting themselves up for failure almost.
Jeanette:
Right.
Bryan:
But I'm not really sure even, how do you navigate through that? There's a lot of churches that want to grow younger, but if their current congregation isn't on that platform, how do you navigate that?
Jeanette:
Well, and I think that's one of the hard parts, is you may be saying, "Well, I don't want to have to do the things and do the reels and the TikTok dances, but I know that in order for my church to grow, our community beyond our church doors is younger families or younger people, younger professionals maybe," whatever that the case may be, "in order to reach that demographic of people, I'm going to need to do this." And there's a ton of ideas. One is I would do, is there anybody in your community that fits that demographic? And you were talking about this older church where they want to reach younger people, do any of those older people have a child or a grandchild?
Bryan:
Right.
Jeanette:
And kind of do a focus group situation where you're talking to these people and just getting to know them, sitting down person to person. We're not even talking about social media at this point. Make a phone call, do those things and figure out, like you said, we were talking about this a minute ago, where do you even start, right?
Bryan:
Right.
Jeanette:
And so I think that's one thing, and then there are so many tools out there to help you create the content, but the bottom line is if you don't have good content, it's not going to work. And so one of the things I think about, especially with Instagram, but it could go for TikTok or even certain elements of Facebook, is if you're an older church and you're trying to reach a younger group of people, then tell me, a younger person, that's not really me, y'all, I'm old, but let's pretend I'm young for five minutes, tell me, your potential audience, why I would want to come to your church. And a lot of that is letting people know, "We welcome you here."
Maybe even have it be a little fun. Now I'm getting into actual content ideas. My brain's going, "Ooh, you could have somebody talk about that y'all have a great story time for kids, or you have a bunch of business leaders and y'all do a luncheon or a lunch, or some sort of event that younger professionals might want to come to," or whatever. There could be some kinds of things that you let people know, "This is what we do already and we want you to come and be a part of this." I know at my church, we're multi-generational, so we share a lot on our children's Instagram.
We have several different Instagrams because our church is so big, but we have a children's Instagram, but one of the things they do is they highlight the older people in the congregation because there's a partnership that we have with our grandparents. You can adopt a grandparent, and so that's one of the ways that we bridge that gap. So we're talking to younger families, but letting them know that Grandma Jay and Grandma Sue or Grandpa Joe, they're here and they do these fun things with the kids and all that kind of stuff. So it's kind of fun. But yeah, I think you do have to do a little searching into that audience and figure out in what way could your church serve that audience? And then let them know that.
Bryan:
You kind of hinted at this, but I think what I see as important to when any church is trying to figure out how do we grow younger, how do we grow the young families in our church? Or whatever audience that is really regardless of age, I think what's important is that, especially for diving into a new social media platform, because that's what we're talking about, it needs to match reality, right?
Jeanette:
Yes.
Bryan:
So we can't jump on Instagram and post a bunch of different things that don't match what's actually happening in church. And so something that we see a lot is just people expect something because they saw it on Facebook or Instagram or whatever, and then when they show up, it's totally different, and that's not what you want to do and that's not how you're going to grow in that demographic. I think that's really important, to know your audience very quickly. I think there are some key demographics that you can look at to know which audience is on which platforms, and we'll link to those in the show notes. There are tons of studies out there and reports that show you where people are hanging out, what ages are hanging out on what platform. So we'll link to that. But I think another thing that is important is knowing your own capacity and your own bandwidth. So you may want to hop onto Twitter because you're trying to reach that audience, but if you don't have time to tweet, then it's not doing you any good.
Jeanette:
Right, and Twitter specifically, you have to have a lot of time, because everything is like, you kind of have to be part of the conversation when it's happening. It's not one of those things where on Facebook, or even Instagram to some extent, although the algorithm on Instagram specifically does you to be timely, but with Facebook, you can comment. Well, sometimes I won't see somebody's post until three days after they posted it. You know?
Bryan:
Right, yeah.
Jeanette:
So they clearly don't care about the timeliness on Facebook as much, so I can comment on that three days later typically if I want to. Whereas on Twitter, if you're not in the conversation when it's happening, then it's over. So that's especially true, for sure. I think also with the bandwidth and capacity at my church, I briefly mentioned that we have our own, different ministries have different Instagram, and for Instagram accounts, and not every ministry does because their audience isn't there. But for the ones who are, we decided that there was enough things that we needed to be communicating and connecting with that particular ministry group on that we decided to create multiple accounts. So we have the main account, children's ministry, and youth ministry are the big ones. There's a couple of others that are popping up for some other outside outreaches.
We found that, whereas TikTok gets a lot of words, a lot of hype today for being the younger place to be, but a lot of younger people are on Instagram, especially the ones making a decision about whether or not to go to church and where to go to church. So it may not be 14-year-olds or 15-year-olds on there, it may be your 25-year-olds, but they're there, and then also we have our youth on there. And we kind of promote it, like basically, it has the language and the wording and the vibe of talking specifically to the youth, so it's the youth is the audience. But for the children's account, it's not for children, it's for their parents. So that's kind of one thing that we had to decide, "Well, if we're going to do this, who are we talking to? Who are we really talking to?" So we had to know our audience and know that we're going to be targeting these messages and these engagement pieces to parents.
Bryan:
So, I think that's a good idea of how, I think, how to know when to not be on a platform or what platforms to join. Another one that we haven't really talked about too is when you make that decision to join a new social media or the ones that you're on currently, is that you also need to have a plan. You need to be strategic about it. We talked a little bit about that at the beginning, but what's your idea for, I want to join TikTok, how do I incorporate that into my overall strategy for our church's brand?
Jeanette:
Yeah, so specifically with TikTok, but you could also apply this to reels on Instagram, which basically is trying to become its own...
Bryan:
Yeah.
Jeanette:
It almost seems like Instagram is saying, "We just want to be another TikTok," so they're devaluing photos and their feed and all that kind of stuff, so video is becoming more and more and more prevalent. So you can have the same type of process when trying to come up with content ideas, or strategy even more so than the content itself. But I think when you're thinking about those two platforms, especially with the short form vertical video, you want to say, "Okay, well, what value can we give the audience that we know is there? So parents, teens, young adults, whatever that happens to be, what value can we give them? What part of our ministry, our mission, what part of our mission to spread the..." Because we all know everybody's church mission is different, but it's also the same, it's to bring more people to Jesus, so, "What part of what we're going to try to do in video, in these short form video formats, will help do that? Is there a value that we can give those people?"
And so you have to ask why do people go and scroll through TikTok for hours at a time? Why do they do that? Do they want to have a deep philosophical conversation, or do they just want to laugh at something? It's the same with the TikTok reels or stories. It's like, what do they want? And so a lot of times, when I was speaking with a church recently about this and they were talking about some content ideas or their strategy, trying to figure out what their video strategy was going to be, that style of reel or TikTok video, and it was like, "Okay, well you don't have to have all of the information in the TikTok video." The video itself grabs attention, entertains, encourages. Those are the two things that you want to focus on. Is it entertaining, is it encouraging? And then in your description of said video is where you might share more details. And so I think what is your church brand? Is it that entertaining kind of thing? Maybe not. Some churches are like that, and some are like, "We're not that funny, we don't want to do..."
Bryan:
Right, yeah.
Jeanette:
But they do have some great encourage... I mean, if you're a church, you have some great encouragement to share. That's part of what we have, we have that hope, we have that joy, we have that peace.
Bryan:
Right, right, right.
Jeanette:
You can share that kind of encouragement, and once you figure that part out, then you can walk through the practical, like, "What are the kinds of things we're going to say, and what type of music do we use?" That kind of thing.
Bryan:
Right.
Jeanette:
But I think it's what value can you give the people you're trying to reach? And know that the video itself doesn't have to have all the meat of the content. It can have that attention grabbing, entertaining, or encouraging thing, and then the description of it can have more.
Bryan:
In a nutshell, whatever platform you're on, it needs to align with both your church's voice, like your style, but also your brand and your mission and what you're trying to accomplish. Those two things, along with knowing your audience and your own capacity, those should guide you onto deciding what platforms to be on or not to be on. So real quickly, I want to talk just for a moment about platforms that a church is already on, but they're not getting good engagement, which we talked about engaging differently on the last episode, they're not getting good engagement, but they still have a presence there. So when does a church know it's time to bail on any social media platform?
Jeanette:
Yeah. So basically, if you have done all of the types of things that we've talked about, not only in this episode but other episodes where we talk about your strategy and building community and engaging with other people, and it's still not working, that might not be your fault. If you're doing all the best practices and it seems more like a chore and that you're not seeing any benefit and it's taking time away from your other social platforms that you might be on that are doing well, or other areas of ministry or digital communications that are doing well, then I think it might be time to bail out. Now, depending on the platform, there's different ways to do this. Now, I do think there's some value in keeping your handle, so if you're @hopechurch on Instagram, you can keep your handle and you can let people know the best way to get in touch with you. Just in case someone happens to find you there, right?
Bryan:
Right.
Jeanette:
Because who knows? Maybe they're not there now, but they will be. So you don't necessarily want to get rid of it. So maybe you just, this is what we did with our Twitter, because we were early adopters at my church so we got on Twitter real quick, and there was a strategy that we could have used, but nobody had the time to do it. You see what I'm saying?
Bryan:
Right.
Jeanette:
So it's not like we didn't have an idea of what we wanted to do, but literally there was just no bandwidth. So we had to decide, "Okay, well, we don't want to just get rid of the handle, because we have used it a little bit." And so what we did was we changed the bio feed to say, "Come hang out with us on Instagram," and I forget exactly what we said, but we directed them to another social media channel that we were more active on, and then also gave contact information and let them know that our DMs were open if anybody wanted to reach out, and we had a way to make sure that those were connected. So that's really just an easy way to do that.
On Facebook, I think there is a case that even if you're not planning on being on Facebook, you need to have, so that if somebody wants to tag your location, your church as a location, that your church page, that something comes up. So again, I think it's okay to have a place where maybe you're not posting all the time, but it's there, but it's not part of your strategy. I mean, some people would say deactivate it. I mean, I know there's some experts out there that would say don't do it. But I think if you're already there, then create a way, whether it's in your About section or whatever, a way to let people know who you are as a church and how they can get in touch with you. And especially on a page, we're not talking about Facebook groups here and all that kind of stuff, that's a whole different conversation.
Well, I do want to just briefly mention, you may not need a page that is active and constantly doing stuff, but maybe you do need a group. You see what I'm saying? So it's okay to not spend a ton of time developing your page out, your page strategy when you could just have an internal Facebook group, and that's where you're posting your internal things. So anyway, that's my two cents. There may be other wisdom about that, and I don't know on the tech side if it's bad to have a page that's not really that active, but the truth is, if you let that go, if you let that tension go of, "I have to make it, I have to try to do more and more and more," and if you just say, "I'm going to do what I can. It's going to be there, I can moderate it. It's fine," then that allows you brain space and bandwidth to work on those other platforms that are better for you.
Bryan:
Yeah. Like you were saying, I think there's a way to leave it well and to not give it up at the same time. So tell people where to find you and make sure that you are very clear that this isn't an active platform that you're using, but there are other ones that you're on. And I think that's a good way to leave a platform well, but don't give it up, because if you give up your handle or whatever, you can't take that back. There are times where your audience just isn't there, or your engagement, people aren't seeing your posts on Facebook, and so do you need to be spending that much time posting every day? Probably not. You can focus your attention in other places. And so recognizing the importance and figuring out where you need to devote your time and where you need to give up could be really good for your own just bandwidth and your capacity, and so I think that's a good way to think through how you're using social media.
Jeanette:
And one thing I didn't mention, but is worth as we're wrapping up here saying, there is also, maybe yes, you do have an audience on a social media platform, and yes, you do have someone that's willing to do, they're willing to do the reels and maybe you have some people that are really wanting to do it, wanting to do it, but your website is not great. You don't have an email list that's up to date. Other things like that, I would focus on those things first. That's one of the things that when I was talking with my friend Tyler, that he would say, is like, "Hey, make sure that all of that other stuff," you know people are going to Google you, right?
Bryan:
Yep.
Jeanette:
What are they going to see when they go there first? You want to make sure that's in line and that the other ministry areas are taken care of first.
Bryan:
Yeah, and I think that just goes back to your capacity. You need to do these things well because that's more important. Your email list, your website, whatever it is, those are more important to your church's central strategy, its brand strategy, its communication strategy, whatever, that's more important than trying to do Twitter well or any other platform. So recognizing your priorities, your bandwidth, your capacity, and figuring out how to manage that well. And then let the rest just kind of play it out and see what happens, and over time, you can build volunteer teams and you can do other things to build into those different platforms if it's valuable for your church. But for now, know your own limits, and that's okay.
Thanks for listening to The Church Juice Podcast. If you haven't already, make sure you subscribe wherever you're listening today. It would mean a lot if you took the time to leave us a review as well. That helps other church leaders find the podcast so that we can continue to serve and support churches by energizing communications. By the way, we'll continue today's discussion, which I'm really excited about, in our Facebook group. And you can find the link to our group along with today's show notes at churchjuice.com/podcast.
Jeanette:
The Church Juice Podcast is a listener-supported production of ReFrame Ministries, a family of programs to help you see your whole life reframed by God's Gospel story. Church Juice is produced by Bryan Haley, with post production by Minimal Media Company in Grand Rapids, Michigan. For more information about Church Juice, visit churchjuice.com. For more information on ReFrame Ministries, visit reframeministries.org.