I love social media. I especially love being part of the team that creates the social media for my church. We don’t have it all together and run on the smell of an oily rag.
There is one element to our social media that I think we have nailed, despite our small budget. It’s an extremely important gap that I think many churches miss with their social media. It’s an obvious mis-step that doesn’t need to be there.
That’s interaction and engagement.
I’m not talking about occasionally liking a comment here and there on Facebook or Instagram. Or retweeting someone when they engage with your church Twitter handle.
I’m talking about leveraging conversations that are already underway on social media. Especially on Twitter.
How do you leverage existing conversations?
#hashtags
Let me give you one example. Recently we had The Bible Series here in Australia on TV and the hashtag was #thebibleau. The show had huge ratings in the first few weeks and strong ratings to the end of the series.
Yet we were the only church in the country following and engaging in the conversation on the #thebibleau every week during the series.
Sure, there were some churches that promoted the show prior to the broadcast, ourselves included. But not one church during the broadcasts when the hashtag was in full use. It even was even the No.1 trended hashtag in Australia while the show was on. Many, many people were engaging online about the show.
Yet, no churches were there. Except us.
I’m not having a go here. Or bragging.
I’m simply saying that we are missing a huge opportunity here to join a large group of people who are already engaging in faith conversations. Through the church handle, I engaged with many different people about Jesus. Some had small numbers of followers. Some had tens of thousands of followers. One vital thing you need to know is that when you interact with someone who has thousands of followers is that you are not just interacting with that one person, but all their followers too. The played out because many of the followers of people I was interacting with also started to interact with the church twitter account as well.
This is just one example of engagement. How do you engage and interact on social media? Drop a comment below.
