Having a social media ministry for your church is a powerful way to engage with people outside of your 4-walls. Nowadays, most churches have a straightforward website informing their existing congregation (and hopefully attracting new congregants with a website that has strong SEO) about their various offerings, leadership, ministries, and more. What most do not have is connecting their ministry to the social media sphere to engage with both believers and non-believers with the gospel message of Jesus Christ, and this is a missed opportunity!

COVID-19 found many churches closing down due to tight restrictions hindering churchgoers from going to church. While some churches suffered, others flourished, having prepared an online ministry and utilizing social media alike to connect with people that were homebound.

 

Why Social Media?

Let’s face it—Social Media is here to stay and has church congregants hooked. Mediums like Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, and Twitter are constantly used by generations of people, even baby boomers (for you naysayers out there). Some social media platforms gravitate toward a younger demographic base while others are an older demographic, and your church’s intent behind your push for social media will ultimately determine which platform to prioritize.

The reason for Social Media for your church is to extend your outreach ministry so that outreach and evangelism aren’t just delegated to an on-premise location. By taking your message to reach the world through social media, you will:

• Reach the lost with the Gospel message
• Introduce physical and online bible studies for people that your church is currently not reaching
• Provide enriching content to help believers walk out their faith and mature spiritually
• Raise awareness and attendance of your various ministries, programs, events, and more

You have the opportunity to move beyond your physical location and reach the entire world, even raising your chances of drawing more church attendance for the local population that may find your church on social media due to your increased presence there.

 

Stats for Our Non-Profit Ministry Living Revelations

My wife and I run a ministry called Living Revelations where we’re impacting hundreds of thousands of lives weekly. We do not operate a church, but we do run weekly online bible studies that we’ve been able to fill with hundreds of people thanks to the outreach element of social media.

We also run yearly conferences called Discover Your Purpose where people from all ages get to lay their dreams, visions, pursuits, and lives back at the feet of Jesus and live their lives for Him as they learn from speakers in the five-fold ministry as well as those prospering in the marketplace.

We have an average of 120,000 reaches weekly with a strong engagement rate of 38,000 followers as of December 29, 2022. Testimonies continually pour in and we’re able to pray for countless of them as people message us their prayer requests. Below is a screenshot of accounts reached by our posts from November to December.

Below is a screenshot of accounts reached from March to April with an increase in reach by 5 times.

Living Revelations did not start with the intention of reaching people on Social Media. It began with my wife Gabrielle simply writing a blog post weekly, encouraging people to find God real in their everyday lives. As time progressed, we realized that a large portion of the demographic we feel called to minister to (Millenials and Gen-Z) are on social media and we diligently repurposed our blog and podcast content to reach the lost and believers alike with the Gospel and encouraging messages on Instagram.

We are not a church, but imagine if your church had these numbers. It’s totally possible, and you can start today!

 

Which Social Media Channels?

The choice of Social Media Channels to use depend largely on the amount of time you can invest toward your social media ministry along with the qualified personnel to do it.

Our main recommendation will always be Instagram and Facebook as you can link your church’s Instagram account to the Facebook account for your church and schedule posts to be published on both platforms without having to manually post once on one platform, and then the same post on the other.

Instagram introduced Reels a long while ago that are essentially short bite-sized video content that not only your followers can consume, but also people not currently engaging with your church profile. Imagine then, starting a new Instagram profile for your church with few followers, and creating 1-minute snippets of videos highlighting portions of the Sunday sermon that can reach hundreds and thousands of people—all while having few followers!

When we have clients with no social media presence, we focus on creating reels for them while creating a solid hashtag strategy to maximize their reach and thus increase their following. Facebook now features Reels as well in the latter part of 2022, enabling you to effectively grow your church page on Facebook by reaching those that are currently not following your page.

TikTok is insanely popular with the very young generation, but there will be a big time commitment as you will have to focus predominantly on videos (since they don’t allow just graphic postings like Instagram and Facebook do). Twitter is cool but we find that they don’t do much to share your content with others, and thus, we don’t recommend it.

We find the biggest players for this are certainly Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, with Instagram coming in first place.

 

5 Benefits of Social Media Ministry

1. Draw the Local Population to Your Church

Surprisingly, increasing your reach on social media will also enable the local population near your church to engage with your church and attend your services. The reason for this is that by having a social media ministry, you enable viewers to trust you before they ever make it into your church building. Often, when people are deciding which church to attend, they will visit the church’s website and social media presence to decide whether it’s a good fit for them.

2. Spiritual Growth for Attendees of Your Church and Non-Attendees

Having a social media ministry means that you get to dish out content that both reach the lost and also helps develop believers in their spiritual growth. This applies not only to those that do not attend your church, but also those that attend your church. If your attendees are constantly on social media, they may end up catching a post from you that leads them to a breakthrough in a trying time, or even cause them to engage with you by sending a prayer request.

3. Reaching the Younger Generation

Most churches have an older population, and that trend may not be going away soon. When we reach the younger generation through our ministry’s Instagram, we learn that many of them do not attend their local church. Because we are reaching these non-churchgoers, we’re able to encourage them to find a local church and be part of that community for their edification (and the local church).

By increasing your reach through social media, you’ll have the opportunity to reach the younger generation to Christ but also encourage them to attend their local church should they not be near your church. If your church runs online services and online groups, you can encourage them to attend that for the sake of building community.

4. Increase Donations to Your Church

It is evident that as Christians, we are encouraged to give generously, especially to those that provide us with spiritual nourishment. By increasing your reach, you’re able to have the opportunity to receive donations for missions, outreaches, church building funds, ministry funds (like social media ministry), and more all through an online audience that may never step foot in your actual church building.

Not only do you get to be blessed, but you also enable the opportunity for your online audience to be blessed through their giving as God may put it in their heart to support your church for the spiritual growth in their lives that you’ve been able to provide them with.

5. Increase Engagement with your Services and Activities

Because your social media presence will be strong, local attendees will be more likely to remain engaged with church activities, be it events or even small groups, to help foster community. Because most of the population is online for large hours of the day, if you’re not on social media, then you’re depending solely on your announcements and pamphlets to get information to your attendees. Don’t settle for that! Make use of social media and your website!

 

Things To Consider

When it comes to building your social media ministry, you must understand that this is not about hastily gaining followers. Although our business focuses on helping you connect with your audience and increasing revenue, when it comes to building your social media presence, it is a long-term strategy that if you remain faithful to it you’ll then see dividends as your following scales.

Consistency will be key when running your social media ministry. Do not post 3 times one week and then fail to post the second week. If you’re going to be posting, focus on posting at least 3 times a week and remaining consistent, knowing that your followers are looking forward to your posts. Should you not be consistent, the social media algorithms will not work in your favor and thus make it harder for people to view your content and thus engage with your church.

You may not have the best camera, the best video editing, or the best copywriting, but so long as you are consistent, then you’ll be able to extend your physical reach into the social media sphere.

Now when starting a social media ministry, you’re going to want to have personnel that is knowledgeable in the field. We’re not saying to do business with us, as you can do this without our help, but if you do desire a marketing team to handle this for you or even help equip your church, we are more than glad to do it and you can contact us to get that started.

This is what you’ll need:

1. Someone to manage the social media profile full-time

This person will oversee the content schedule, both planning posts but also publishing them. It’s vital to have a content schedule with topic ideas so you can plan out your posts. We like to plan for a month ahead of time, and we even repurpose our podcast videos into 4-5 separate posts in the form of graphics and 1-minute video snippets. We like to manage our content using Notion.

2. Someone to write the captions for your posts

Captions are vital! Creating engaging content is key to helping reach the lost and grow believers in their faith, along with any other goal you may have. Make sure that this person also includes a call-to-action at the end of the post, be that a prayer request link for people to send in their prayers, an event registration, a church invite, signing up for a small group, listening to the latest sermon or podcast, etc.

3. Someone to create and edit Graphics and Videos

Make sure you have someone that can create the graphics and videos in a way that matches your brand. They can utilize free software like Canva (or do the paid version of Canva as their features are instrumental for social media posts), or make them using Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Premiere Pro.

 

In Closing

We hope that this helps you understand the need for a social media ministry in your church and that the tips included here help serve you to accomplish that. Just remember: your success isn’t based on the follower count, but instead, on the lives you impact. You can have 30 followers and be reaching a few, but in heaven, you may just find that some lives were saved all because you remained faithful with even such a small number.

May God grant you immense favor and wisdom in the implementation of your social media ministry and thus increase your online presence to impact lives.