CSL 007 – How can I use Social Media to Grow my Church? Tips and Strategies to Manage your Church’s Social Presence.

Isabelle Faletti (00:00:01):

Hello, and welcome to ChurchSpring Live episode zero zero seven. Thank you so much for joining us today. My name is Isabelle. I am part of the ChurchSpring customer success team here and joining me today is Rohn Gibson, co-founder of ChurchSpring. Hello everyone. You guys are all in for an amazing episode. I will just say that. So if you have ever felt overwhelmed with social media, for your church, how to use it, this is the episode for you. So stay tuned. We are going to discuss how churches can use social media. We will share some really helpful time saving tips and even we’re going to give away some amazing resources that will just help you save time and stress. We will review a social media content calendar, what that even means for your church. And we are going to give away 101, ready to go.

Isabelle Faletti (00:00:57):

Social media posts that you can immediately use for your church. So if you want those 101 social media posts to use for your church, for your ministry, I want to hear it from you. So drop a comment right now and just type in social. If you want those three social media posts and we will get you those. And then I’m also going to show you how you can schedule certain content right within your website. You can schedule social media posts to automatically post. So we’ve got a lot stay tuned. For those of you who are new to ChurchSpring, we are a software provider committed to the great commission. So we love, we love working with you. We love working with church leaders and creating church websites and resources that can equip you. So we want to hear from you all.

Isabelle Faletti (00:01:47):

So yes, we love seeing Ron, Pamela and Nikki so many saying, yes, you want those free 101 social media posts. So, Ugh. Thank you. We can’t wait. We’re gonna, we wanna hear from you. We want to know who’s, who’s listening, who’s tuning in. So share your church name where you’re from in the comments below you will have to give String Yard access so that we can display your name in our live stream here, but we cannot wait to hear more from you, Ron. Hello? We love you’r site. You’re from one hope cf.com. Awesome. We’re super excited to have you. This won’t be confusing to have two Ron.

Rohn Gibson (00:02:31):

This is so cool. It’s so neat to see familiar faces and the comments people who have been here before. So we had some some people, yeah, who have been on a live stream before, who were posting, where they were from and the name of their courage before we even got going. So that is so awesome. It is so good to be with you all this morning. We were just talking, and this is just one of the highlights of the week, right here. Being able to come on, do this Facebook live actually, and now we’re on YouTube as well. So those YouTube out there, we’re also streaming live on YouTube as well. So it’s so good to be with you all here. Literally, we’re getting so many comments. It’s like, okay, we got Pamela joining as well. So welcome Pamela from Cochran Avenue, Baptist church and LA. So welcome.

Rohn Gibson (00:03:16):

So good to have you all here this morning. So just a couple of quick announcements and we’re going to get in. Yeah, we have got a power packed episode and that is I feel like we’re gradually getting better every single episode. This is number seven and I’ll tell you, we have some serious value for you today and I’m anyway, I can’t wait to dive in. So again, no matter what platform you’re on, you’re on. Please leave comments. If you have questions throughout the episode today, please share those. If you have a question, please, please, please don’t feel like, Oh, maybe this is a bad question, share it. Yeah. And we’d be happy to answer any of those. I always tell my team, the only bad question is the one you have that you don’t ask. So please, please, please share those questions.

Rohn Gibson (00:04:05):

Go ahead. And like this video, you can go ahead and, and share it. You could even do a watch party. You can tag a friend if there’s somebody, even in your ministry that you think, man, they, they do our social media. They really need to be here. Feel free to tag them. They can even come back and watch it after the live is over. So we will be posting this episode again into Facebook as well as on YouTube. But we will be most importantly posting it on our website. We’re actually going to talk about that a little bit about the importance of your website, even with social media. So we’re going to be posting it on our site with the video, in addition to all the resources we’re going to talk about today. So don’t feel like you’ve got to have a pen and paper ready and just write everything down and then miss something.

Rohn Gibson (00:04:55):

Just sit back, relax. Go ahead. Give it a listen. And then you can always go back. Churchspring.Com forward slash C S L for ChurchSpring Live forward slash C S L zero zero seven. You can see the video there. We’ll have the show notes. We’re going to give you resources there. So anyway, super excited for this episode and the resources that we can’t wait to get into your hands. Before we jump in one last thing. One last thing we want to talk a little bit about your desired outcome for your church website. So we’re, we’re asking this question at the beginning of every episode, because we want to make sure that we tailor these episodes to meet your specific needs. So what is the number one? And I’m going to ask you to engage here. So get your fingers ready. I want you to type in the comments. What is the number one outcome you hope to achieve with your church website? Okay, so again, I’m not going to give any examples. We’re just going to leave it open ended. What is the number one desired outcome you hope to achieve from your church website? So go ahead. I’m going to stop for a minute. Put your comments in the comments there. We’ll wait just a minute. I want to see at least one, one. All right. I think we’ve got some fingers flying over there.

Isabelle Faletti (00:06:19):

I can see the steam flying up from all those keyboards there.

Rohn Gibson (00:06:23):

Awesome. Awesome. Well, welcome! I know we’ve had a few joins since we just kick things off. So welcome to all those who are joining us. Nikki Maloney, end user ease to get the info they need and want. Yes, yes. Mission accomplished with ChurchSpring. And we’re going to show you some more of that,utop Google search results. Yeah. So,uJohnny, what is the ultimate thing you want to have happen from that? So you want to be at the top of Google. So are you, are you hoping existing members find you and come and engage with your content? Are you looking for new people to come? So maybe give us a little clarity on that, Johnny, what is the end outcome that you want to see from even that, that top ranking there in Google? Unumber one, ease of use updating the site,uto communicate God’s word and our mission effective to our congregation and beyond. So yeah, this is awesome. Thank you all for jumping in there. We’re going to jump into the content now again, as Isabelle talked about, it’s all about social media today, and so let’s just dive on it.

Isabelle Faletti (00:07:32):

Yeah, man, I’m excited to talk about social media, Rohn. I love social media. It is so important personally, how I know what’s going on with my church of events of changes currently, right now we are going through the pandemic. And so it is one of, again, the main resources that I know of what to do when I’m going to church. How do I register? So let’s address the question first. Does my church really need to use social media? Is it truly important to a church’s communication style and plan?

Rohn Gibson (00:08:11):

Yeah. So I think that the question I would have is do you want to reach your community? And if the answer is yes, then the answer’s yes. Yup. I was, I was thinking about this just in preparation for this episode and in a couple of different ways. So number one, social media is by far one of the most powerful digital church communication tools you have in your toolbox. One of the thoughts I actually had in my run this morning was if Jesus was physically walking the earth today, what do you use social media. So I’m going to kind of throw you a, that question actually is about what do you think?

Isabelle Faletti (00:08:48):

I think he probably would. I laugh when I think of Jesus walking along, pulling out his phone, he would probably have some helpers to help with, you know, Instagram stories inside

Rohn Gibson (00:09:04):

Thinking about that and like, what are some applications? So if you, if you think about the story of Peter and when he was out there fishing on, I didn’t catch anything. Jesus was you know, teaching on the shore and Peter came to shore and what did he ask? He asked to use his boat and why? So go out to the sea. So then he could, he could reach more people. He could speak to more people. It was a tool, it was a tool, it was a tool for ministry. So just kind of thinking and I’m curious, I’d love to hear comments. Do you think of Jesus walk the earth today? Would he use social media to reach and teach? So I’d love to hear your thoughts on that, but that was a thought that came up today. So sorry to kind of throw that out there, but I think he would, I really think he wouldn’t, I think we have some very practical examples of tools that Jesus used.

Rohn Gibson (00:09:55):

There in ministry. So two reasons I would say absolutely. Yes. And I’ve already given one of them and that’s reach no matter where you are located, we have, we’ve got people joining from Omaha. We’ve got people joining from Los Angeles. We’ve got people joining all over the country. And the reality is there’s people in your community, no matter what community you live in, who are using social media. So here’s just a couple of stats. I don’t want to just like butcher you with stats this morning, but it’s important to know the facts cause there’s a lot of opinion out there, but let’s look at the facts. So a couple of stats, one from Pew internet, and this is from 2018, roughly two thirds of us adults, 68% now report that they are Facebook users. So this is just Facebook. This isn’t even all the other social networks. This is 68% now report that there are Facebook users in 2019, and this is a different report according to the marketer. Great resource for those data nerds out there like myself. I love, I love tools like this In 2019 at 90.4% of millennials, 90.4% of millennials

Isabelle Faletti (00:11:05):

That’s a lot!

Rohn Gibson (00:11:07):

77.5 of generation X and 48.2% of baby boomers were active social media users. Wow. Time and time again, we hear people all we want. We want to reach younger people. We want to reach this demographic. Guess what? Social media is a powerful tool to reach all of them. So a couple of stats there last one, and this is just staggering, 321 million new people joined social media in 2019.

Isabelle Faletti (00:11:37):

Wow. My brain can’t wrap itself around that!

Rohn Gibson (00:11:41):

All the billions who are using it now 321 million people, which gives us. So, so that brought the total from 3.4 8 billion in 2018 to 3.8 billion social media. So an increase of 9% in 2020, guess what? That’s not slowing down. That’s going to continue to increase, continue to increase. So social media has enormous reach no matter where you’re located. I’m I live in small town, America, rural America. And guess what? Social media can be used to reach people here. It’s not just a big city thing. It’s in all these areas where our, where our churches are located. Lastly, here. So we look at reach and now we look at engagement. So it’s not just about being a, you know, this billboard or this brochure that we just broadcast, broadcast, broadcast, broadcast, but it’s actually a tool that we can use to engage people to drive action. So one of the really neat things I know you’re all on Facebook right now. We’ve got some hearts already, which is the love emotion. So love as it turns out is the most powerful emotion driving 40. What is that? 46% of total reactions on Facebook, according to social pilot, 46%. Wow. Wouldn’t it be awesome.

Rohn Gibson (00:13:09):

And it’s yeah, it kind of hits you in the heart. I mean, not being, trying to be funny, but like really, it kind of hits you in the heart. Like, wouldn’t it be great if that was our reaction that if that was the reaction we saw in the world today that we live in, that it was even greater than that, that, that was our response love was our response. So I saw that I’m like, man, that’s, that’s just, that’s so awesome. Now let’s take it outside of social media. I’ll just leave that there. I’m not going to preach. So lastly here under engagement and this is just super applicable. So don’t hear the stat and then just write it off as well. That’s not related to me cause that’s super helpful. And that’s 54% of social media browsers use social media to research products. So what that means is people are literally making buying decisions based on what they see on social media.

Rohn Gibson (00:14:07):

If for one second, you think that’s not the same case and the church you’re wrong, they are making decisions based on what they see on social media. Or let me throw this a little bit of a news flash out there. If you’re not there, they’re also making decisions based on that, which means you’re not there. So definitely some things to consider there. So to answer the question, does my church really need to use social media? I think we’ve been fantastically answered that. Yes. Now we’re going to talk a little bit about what you should be.

Isabelle Faletti (00:14:37):

Yeah, yeah. And too, to your point, Ron, if a church does not have a social media presence and if it’s one of the 90% of the millennials or 77% of the gen of gen X, they that there’s no social media presence for a church. And they interpret that as this church is not up to date or aware of current issues or what’s going on. And it’s not, it’s not a, a fresh church and that’s very, we want our, we want, we want the church to grow and in every sense of the way. So it’s so important to have for, for a church to have a website. I mean, we, we, we cannot express that more than, than right now. So that actually leads me Rohn, into the next question that I want to talk about. I, we get this question occasionally on the support team from church leaders who are new to websites and kind of online presence. So I’m always glad when we have people ask this question because it opens up such a good conversation. So does a church need a church website if they have a Facebook page already set up?

Rohn Gibson (00:15:55):

Yes. That’s such a great question. I’m just going to answer it concisely. Yes. so I want to do a quick comparison and maybe unpack that a little bit, cause I’m sure there’s people, you know, potentially watching or will watch this later. And like, of course you said that you’re a church. You know, one of the pieces of software you offer is church websites. Well, let me unpack it a little bit. So your physical home base for your church is where you meet, right? So that’s your building, whether it’s a building you own or what’s one of your renting. I know we’ve had people say that they’re meeting in movie theaters or whatever. Well, that is your physical home base. When you have gatherings, that’s where you’re telling people to go. When you go out and you hand out information, you invite people. We say, Hey, join us.

Rohn Gibson (00:16:34):

Here’s our address. Come meet here. That’s your home base. So what you go out and just randomly now on a, on a piece of property you don’t own, you would go say, Hey, we’re going to start gathering here. We’re going to promote it. That we’re going to gather here. This is what we’re going to tell people to come, but yet we don’t own it. So therefore people can control what we say. They can even control if we can even meet there. So you know, all these factors that we just wouldn’t do in our physical home base, like you don’t own it. So therefore people can send what you say. They can tell you whether you can even meet there. They can tell you how to operate while you’re there. You just wouldn’t do that. Yeah. And your digital Home base, you want it to be a place that you own.

Rohn Gibson (00:17:21):

That’s not being censored by somebody that’s not being controlled by some third party resource who has the right to tell you, like, if you don’t own it, that means somebody does. And they have the right to tell you what you can or can’t put on there, unfortunately, cause they own it. So you wouldn’t do that in a physical church setting. So you shouldn’t do it in a digital church home base either. So your church website should be your digital home base that you control you own. You get to determine what is communicated through that platform. Yeah. So here’s the, here’s the truths. Okay. The truth is, and this is true with, with Facebook, which we’re, we’re streaming live through Facebook. They own it. It’s theirs. If they wanted to turn it off, they can turn it off. They own it. This is a Facebook and all these social networks are for profit businesses.

Rohn Gibson (00:18:16):

Understand that it is a privilege to be able to have a Facebook page and to be able to communicate it in this way. It is not a right. And I’m not going to go down that rabbit hole, but just the reality is they own it. Just like if somebody else owned a piece of property, they could dictate what you could or couldn’t do on it. It’s the same thing with Facebook. They own it. They get to determine the rules. So it’s a, it’s a great tool, but you have to play by the rules and again, understand they can change the rules at any time. If there’s things they can do. There’s a lot of controversy going on right now on social media and censorship of content and all those sorts of things. And there’s advertisers pulling out all kinds of stuff. I won’t even again go down that rabbit hole either. But the point is you want to have a home base that you control, that you don’t have to live by anybody else’s rules. It’s your website. You can communicate what you want there and it’s not being censored. So do you need to have a church website if you have a Facebook page? Absolutely. Because that is your digital home base, not any of your social media accounts and that could include Facebook. Yeah.

Isabelle Faletti (00:19:26):

Yup. That’s so good. And to all of you listeners, it may sound like we’re saying kind of two different things. Yes. Need to be on social media. Yes. You need a church website and both of that, but both of those things are correct. Yes, yes, exactly. You need both for the exact reasons that that we’ve discussed here. We, the majority of people are on social media. That’s how people are making their decisions of where to go, what to buy, what church to attend. And yet you need to own your content and by that you need to be on your church website. So yes. You need a church website. Yes. You need to be on social media. Simple as that.

Isabelle Faletti (00:20:09):

So now that hopefully we’ve kind of established the need for a social media. I’m gonna take a quick break and see if everybody who’s listening live. Do you have any questions at this point? Have you had any, any even pushback on when you’ve tried to get on social media for your church or you are in social media, what’s been your experience? Has, has it been a really good experience? Have you been trying to figure out what do I post on social media? Great. I created a Facebook page, but what now? I haven’t posted for a couple months. So drop a comment below just overall. How are you feeling about social media with your church? Are you feeling excited? A little overwhelmed. Let us know. So we’ll take a couple, couple of seconds here. Drop that comment here. We want to know kind of where, where are your feeling in this?

Isabelle Faletti (00:21:01):

Because it can be new to some, or you might be on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter all day long and it’s a very natural platform for you to be on. So let us know where you’re at. Will help speak specifically to that. So Ron, how should churches use social media? What is the actually look like in a very tangible way? We have Nikki, she just commented. This is awesome. Well, not awesome for you, but we’ll talk about this, Nikki. You said we have too many admins on our Facebook page and they were posting over each other, reducing reach. You need a social media content calendar, Nikki. And we’ll talk about that actually in a couple of seconds here. So yes, that that’s frustrating. Kind of too many cooks in the kitchen. You need a lead and everybody needs to understand their specific role. So Rohn, let’s take it away and let’s, let’s help Nikki here. How should churches use social?

Rohn Gibson (00:22:05):

Yeah. So I, I really appreciate you posting that because we’re going to, we’re going to talk about that. So first of all, when you get a lot of people involved, especially in a church setting, there’s a lot of volunteers and it’s important even with volunteers that there’s leadership. Yeah. That you’re, that you’re a team you’re coming together, but there still needs to be somebody there at your ministry that’s responsible for the communication efforts there at your church. So the first thing I would say is praise the Lord. You have people that want to be involved because there are so many places where just trying to get people to move, to get to get now it’s so it’s, that’s a, that’s a huge blessing. Yeah. Now it’s leading those people and we’re going to talk about some of the things that you could do to start down that path.

Rohn Gibson (00:22:52):

Number one, the leadership and I would include the team on this is define your goals. So what does success look like with your social media communication efforts? Right. So what does success look like? Just like I’ve asked early on what is the number one outcome you want to see with your church website? You should be asking the same thing as it relates to your social media efforts. And number one, define your goal. What that does is it starts to give tremendous clarity to all your volunteers, or maybe it’s you, maybe you’re not blessed like Nikki, where you’ve got all these people who want to be involved and share, share stuff. And I know blessings can also feel like weights and curses sometimes I, so I also get that don’t want to act like that’s not the case because there are times like that, but defining your goals can really help bring tremendous clarity and unity into a group of volunteers like that. So that’s what I would number one, define your goals. And you can do that by saying, what does success look like for your social media efforts?

Isabelle Faletti (00:23:49):

So Rohn, for that specifically what, what would an example of that be? So for, for me, I’m, I help manage social media for my church for the young adult ministry specifically. So I make sure to post on Instagram, on our Facebook group, my goal is to increase communication to the young adults so that we will have people attending our events. And also so that our current young adults will invite their friends. Their community to this event, is that the type of goal you’re talking about or do I need to dive even deeper on numbers for all, all the heads out there?

Rohn Gibson (00:24:32):

So you could go crazy here. Right? One of the really great things about digital communication tools is that there’s so many analytics and metrics that you could look at, but ultimately at the end of the day, there’s, there’s what we call vanity metrics, where things like re you know, like reach as far as, from the perspective of, you know, X number of people, you know, watching this video. I’m not saying that that’s not a metric that we should look at, but ultimately each, each church needs to define what does success look like to them? Because maybe that is maybe it’s, Hey, we want, we want to get a thousand people to watch our live stream, or maybe we’ve had a thousand people to watch our live stream on average. And we want to increase that by 10% over the next 12 weeks. Okay. That’s a measurable, specific goal that you can really go after.

Rohn Gibson (00:25:23):

And they, and just based on what you unpacked there Isabelle, you would say then success for you is attendance of existing members, and then increased growth of attendance based on engaging and activating those existing members, by the way that that is your, your, your greatest communication and outreach to are your, are your people we’re called to go into all the world. And we’re just using social media. Social media is not a replacement for that. It’s just a tool. So ultimately in the example you just gave, I would say those are the two metrics. Now you can start looking at what are the sub metrics that we want to look at that are the key performance indicators to get us. And we use that all the time in our business for different segments of our business. We have specific key performance indicators, and we want as few as possible that are truly the metrics that actually determine what’s going to help us get to this desired outcome. And I know that may have been like, Whoa, that’s like business talk. That’s not, but you just made it super practical. And that is, we want attendance of our existing membership and we want growth based on activation of our existing members to invite new in to this event. So I would say, how do you leverage social media then to do that?

Isabelle Faletti (00:26:47):

Yeah. Right. Because once I, once we have established our goals, then that trickles down into what I am pushing out on social media Nikki, which admins are even pushing out content on different groups or, or channels. So once you’ve established the goal, that’s really what defines your next steps.

Rohn Gibson (00:27:11):

Yeah. So number two in the how should my church use social media, keep it simple. Yeah. No, after everything I just shared, it’s like really? Yes. Keep it simple. Literally your goal could be, I want to increase attendance. I want to increase the number of new visitors to our site over the next 90 days. Okay. That’s great. That’s a goal. Yeah. The civic now keep it simple. You do not need to leverage every social network on the planet, right. To be able to do that. So what I would recommend if you’re not currently active in social media, or maybe you’re just trying to really get your footing with social media. And you’re probably feeling a lot overwhelmed. If you’re feeling overwhelmed regarding social media type overwhelm in the comments, I guarantee you, I’m wondering who’s going to be the first courageous person to admit what we all admit. Even people who work in this field, like it can be extremely, extremely overwhelming. So what I want to do is give you some tips right now, that’s going to take that overwhelm away. And the number one thing is start with one network, start with one social media network. Don’t feel like you’ve got to be ah, man. I’ve got to be on Facebook and I’ve got to be on Instagram and I’ve got to be on YouTube. And I’ve got to use Snapchat – Nikki – we gotta love that

Isabelle Faletti (00:28:28):

We love you!

Rohn Gibson (00:28:31):

From here. But if I could, I would, because you’re, you’re you get our courageous award today for spending with so many other people. Maybe I hesitate to admit because it’s reality. So don’t feel like you have to do all of them. Just start with one. And the one that I would recommend you start with is Facebook. Facebook has enormous reach, like I’ve shared when we just shared tons of statistics based on that. I would start with Facebook really fine tune that built your team. If you’ve got multiple people, like like Nikki, Pamela, she just agreed, definitely overwhelmed. So let’s, let’s make it smaller. Let’s not take this, you know, universe of social media networks, which could be, which is overwhelming period. And let’s just make it smaller and say, let’s just focus on Facebook. Here’s our goal. We want to increase church attendance over the next 90 days by X, you know, and I would give a specific number, whether it’s a percentage increase over the previous 90 days, or it could just be a number of visitors you would like to see come over that 90 day span and then say, okay, I’m going to use Facebook to do that.

Rohn Gibson (00:29:40):

Now, do I use Facebook to do that? And we’re actually going to give you some specific ideas here, next on exactly how you can do that. So number one, define your goals. Number two, keep it simple. I’m just a simple guy and I don’t like overwhelm and you don’t probably either. So keep it simple. Start with Facebook. And I would just encourage you just on average, there might be some people who I would recommend differently depending on skillsets and team and your ministry, but in general, Facebook is going to be the place we’d recommend you start. So thirdly, create your social media content calendar. You’re like, what in the world are you even talking about? I got enough calendars to deal with. I’ve got my Google calendar and my outlook calendar and my whatever calendar we’ve got church calendars, pastors calendars. I totally get it.

Rohn Gibson (00:30:28):

And we’re going to simplify that. So ultimately your social media calendar basically unifies your team around a goal. And now you’re saying with specific content, how are we going to achieve that goal? Okay. So for an example, I know some people that we talked about earlier on it’s about engagement of your existing membership. So the example that we’re going to give is actually based on that, but we could easily give an example to say, based on new attendance and achieving that goal. So just understand, we would say the goal of this is engaging our existing membership. So we’re going to give you literally ideas for every day of the week. What you can post a little over a year ago. I got to have a time. I had my pastor over have coffee. We were talking about these, these things. And I shared just the thought of how for many people, when you come and sit down in your church and you hear the message, you almost get like this message whiplash, it’s this message that God has unpacked to the pastor all throughout the week, or maybe even months potentially.

Rohn Gibson (00:31:33):

And then a church member sits down in an an hour has all that. And just, just, yeah, just like getting your head, right? Yes, exactly. So one of the things we’ve talked about, and he’s done an amazing job of communicating throughout the week to kind of help us unpack some of those things. So what I’m going to do is give some examples specifically related to that. So if we start with Sunday, Sunday, if you’re live streaming your services, which based on everything that’s going on in the world, Lord willing your church is live streaming. If they’re not stay tuned, we’re going to show you how you can, even with minimal with, with the fit, the tools you have right now, how you can live, stream your services. So number one, Sunday, that would be your live stream of your service. Okay. so on Monday then, so when you live stream and there’s settings, you can do, but most by default, when you live stream, it’s automatically going to post that video and your stream as well as under a video tab inside of Facebook.

Rohn Gibson (00:32:34):

Right? Awesome. You don’t have to do anything. You just live stream, you end the live stream and it’s going to post those places. Check done. You got Sundays post complete Monday, ask practical questions regarding practical application of the Sunday sermon. It’s not just about, Hey, we’re going to come and get you all this information, but actually, okay. What was something that stood out to you in the sermon today? We’ve actually changed some things at our church with our Sunday school time where we actually there’s like a question and a question time in small groups where, and I know a lot of churches do this where it’s like you discuss what was preached. Well, you can do that through social media and drive engagement from the Sunday sermon right there through social media. So now you’re getting people engaged in the conversation, guess what happens? Engaged people, engage others.

Rohn Gibson (00:33:27):

That’s so important. Engaged people in your ministry are going to start engaging with their fellowship of believers, as well as even people outside of that. So you can give questions for practical application of the Sunday sermon on Monday, Tuesday. So typically in your services, you’re going to have a, a song time. I hesitate saying praise and worship time, because I think the whole service is praise and worship time. But everybody knows the song time. So you’re going to have your song list. So share that here’s the song less from Sunday service, which song was your favorite? I love that. Just ask that, ask that question. That’s such a great idea. So now you can start engaging them, even in that context based on the Sunday morning service.

Isabelle Faletti (00:34:13):

Yeah. And there’s a lot of different ways you can do that. You can just add the, the song name and the artist. You can even link if you have a Spotify channel or you can link to the YouTube song or the music video. So there’s a lot of fun, different ways that you can add that on your, on your Facebook page specifically. That’s what we’re talking about, but really you can do that for Instagram, Twitter, any of the platforms here. And then, like Rohn said that encourages people to share content. So I’m, I love music. That’s one of my favorite. Well, it can’t say it’s one of my favorite parts of going to Sunday church, cause it all is, but I worship just, Hmm. I love that. And I love sharing that on my personal Instagram and on my, my personal Facebook. So when churches post that super easy content to share, you are making it really, really simple for your, your church members to hit share and say loved this, the song that I worshiped with on Sunday, it’s speaking to me right now, and that can open up so many amazing conversations that a church member can have with their own Facebook friends, with their own social media network. So may seem simple almost like, like we said, keep it simple. It is, it’s so simple and God can that to create

Rohn Gibson (00:35:38):

Amazing conversations. Yes. And I think they’re really cool thing about this is that a lot of churches hesitant like, Oh, I have to create so much content. Right? Well, the reality is you’re already creating a tremendous amount of content for your, and I’m saying Sunday, but like your Sunday service, you’re creating tons of content use that, use that content to continue to minister to people all throughout the week. Yeah. So Wednesday, Wednesday, prayer requests ask for prayer requests and you can tell them, Hey, if it’s something they can post publicly, put it in the comments below, otherwise send us a message. And we would love to pray for you. There’s churches. I’ve seen that are members of ChurchSpring. That actually just one this week, I actually clicked on it. There he was live stream and it was a per service and they were taking prayer requests in through ’em.

Rohn Gibson (00:36:25):

It was YouTube. And this example, and people were sending in prayer requests and he was praying for them. Awesome. Let’s let’s look at how do we leverage, you know, I don’t want to say leverage, but how do we use these tools for ministry? It’s not just about blasting communication, it’s about ministry and using these tools in ministry. So Wednesday ask for prayer requests. You may even do a live stream based on that. That’s another idea Thursday share the scripture passages that are going to be the focus of Sunday’s message. Okay. So this is where you kind of transition kind of Wednesdays at the beginning of that transition, but then Thursday, you kind of start this, like turning your head into this new week of what’s coming. So share the passages, start to unpack what it’s going to be shared on Sunday.

Rohn Gibson (00:37:16):

So people can start preparing their hearts. There’s a, when our pastor started doing this at our church we had an elderly couple that moved into the area and one of the really cool things was my pastor started sharing this and this, this gentleman would actually go and I find all the verses online and print them all off and read them and like put notes and questions and he would bring those sheets of paper to church. I see him as I run the live stream at my church, I look over and see him sitting there in his chair and he’s got all these sheets printed out and his notes and he’s writing notes. And it’s just, it’s cool where it wasn’t like he just then showed up on Sunday morning and Oh, now I’m, but he actually was able to start preparing his heart and getting in line with what the Lord had for him on Sunday, all throughout the end of that week coming into Sunday.

Rohn Gibson (00:38:07):

So yes, just a simple idea assembly share the scripture passage for the things that are going to be shared on Sunday. And then Friday. So again, you can just tell them, we look forward to seeing you the message title. I know, you know, sometimes pastors are kind of coming together at the last minute as the Lord’s revealing that. So it can be the last minute, just here’s a sermon title or here’s some resource, or here’s some quick a question that we’re going to consider, or you even do a actually I’m going to hold that cause that’s going to be my Saturday, my, my my Saturday thing, but start continuing to build and layer in things that are going to be shared. It could even be, maybe there’s a great article on a blog post, or maybe again, it’s another passage of scripture.

Rohn Gibson (00:38:55):

Maybe it’s a question to consider. Those are all great things that you could share on Friday. And then what I was so excited about to share on Saturday, invite your friends, give a call to action, invite your friends. We all need promptings. We all need promptings. Yeah. And social media. I mean, you could even give specific action items, invent invite three of your local friends to join you for church this Sunday, and then take them out to lunch or whatever that, whatever that may look like in your context, but like have a call to action. It can be updates. It could be events, invite a friend, but things also that you can continue to share to prepare people’s hearts for the message that’s to come. So anyway, we basically just gave you specific a social media calendar of what you can do to leverage content you already have, that’s already being created. Right.

Isabelle Faletti (00:40:00):

That’s amazing. Nikki has a really good question. She just asked on the Monday and Tuesday posts, do you link back to the video of the previous service?

Rohn Gibson (00:40:11):

Yeah, I absolutely would. Yeah, definitely. For sure, because you never know how many people make, you know, whether they had a sickness and illness or they were on vacation or whatever. So be able to continue to link back to that. Absolutely. That’s a great idea.

Isabelle Faletti (00:40:26):

So, Nikki I am actually going to show you how you can schedule sermons to your Facebook page with ChurchSpring’s social scheduler. So you can schedule a sermon. Well, I’ll show you in a couple minutes, I’ll show you how to do that.

Rohn Gibson (00:40:42):

But that is the social scheduler inside of ChurchSpring. And again, it’s available on our Flourish plan which is our top tier plan because there’s just tons of resources available there. But that tool is kind of, I believe it was one of the most underutilized tools and it just it’s so easy. So I can’t wait for you to share that to them, to just be quiet and get into a car. Are there any questions let’s just look down through comments here. I liked John, John is coming as the Lord’s revealing it as a great way to describe procrastination. That’s awesome. I’m going to, you know, always think positive, give the benefit of the doubt. So anyway,

Isabelle Faletti (00:41:20):

And that’s why a social media content calendar just helps it. It lays out the outline what to expect. Everybody’s expecting the same thing. You have, you, you have that out in front of you. So it helps us prevent that that procrastination

Rohn Gibson (00:41:37):

Johnny gets our second,ucourage award for,uprobably speaking what many people who are watching and rewatch, we’ll be thinking as we go through that. So anyway, that’s awesome.

Isabelle Faletti (00:41:49):

So, Rohn, We have covered a lot of content right now. Super helpful information. Again, for all everybody who’s listening live, you will be able to access the show notes or a recording of this at ChurchSpring.com/csl007. So that content calendar that Rohn just went through, we’ll include that in the show notes. So now it’s a lot of information. What do we do? What we do with all of this information, how I’m pumped up, I’m I’m ready to go. What do I do with all this energy?

Rohn Gibson (00:42:20):

Yeah. So, so now it’s time for action, right? Simplicity, keep it simple. And let’s start taking strategic action. Moving forward. It’s all about making the plan and execute the plan. So we’ve given you a plan now it’s time for execution. So Isabelle is actually going to show us the first one and it’s super easy. And that is put the social media links on your church website. So Isabelle is going to show you to do that. So I’m just going to not unpack that. Isabelle do that for us. Number two, create a social media content calendar. We basically just did that for you. Now it’s time to reserve time on your calendar. Maybe assign it out to someone who’s going to do specific things. Nikki, I believe it was earlier mentioned about, you know, people over posting over each other. This is a great opportunity.

Rohn Gibson (00:43:03):

Assign these out, say, Hey, so-and-so, it’s your job on Mondays to post these things. It’s so, and so’s job on Tuesday to post these things. So now everybody’s in sync with each other with that. So create that content calendar and assign things out to the different resources and then drum roll, go and download our free 101 social media posts. And you can get that on our website shortly after we wrap up here and that again, ChurchSpring.Com/Csl007 web link. You don’t even have to give us your email. You literally click, you can download those and go use them however you want. So we’ve already told you, you’re already creating content, use it. You don’t have to come up with anything new. And now on top of that, we’ve given you 101 posts you can start using today. So go download, download those again.

Rohn Gibson (00:43:55):

101 social media posts, ChurchSpring.com/CSL007. If you’re not currently a member of ChurchSpring, and I know we have people, we, I mean, we have thousands of people on our email list that we invite that don’t use ChurchSpring. That’s fine. You can get value in your own context, whatever tools you’re using. Doesn’t matter to us, just use them and reach your community with the gospel. So if you are interested in learning more about church rank, specifically, even the social scheduler, even more so than how Isabelle’s gonna unpack it, join us for a demo churchspring.com/demo. You can choose the time that best fits your schedule, joined myself as well as our co founder and then our teams in chat during business hours, where we will literally show you how you can launch a website in 90 seconds.

Rohn Gibson (00:44:39):

And a lot of the key features of that, one of which is our social media scheduler. So go check that out. Church ring.com/demo. And if you’re like, Hey Ron, I don’t need to attend a demo. I’m just ready to kick the tires on this thing, because thing sounds amazing. You can do that right now and launch your church website in 90 and less than 90 seconds. Churchspring.Com/Trial, create the account that or select the account that best fits your specific needs. Again, the social media schedulers and the flourish plan. So if you want the social media scheduler, that isn’t our top tier plan. And man, I just want to bust into all the things that we’re planning for new features in that, but I’m not going to so say tuned. It will be well worth it. And I will say, and the not so distant future, that plan price is going to increase just because of some of the new features we’re going to be rolling out.

Rohn Gibson (00:45:28):

So that’s a heads up that we weren’t even planning on giving, but I’m going to give it to you all. If you’re not currently on the flourish plan, you want to be go sign up for it or, or upgrade to it. I think we had a question earlier about the 20% discount. If you have an existing 20% discount and then you upgrade, you continue to get that, that, that stays with you during the entire lifetime of your account. So I think that’s all I’m going to say, cause that was a lot. But if you are interested in signing up and putting into action, what we’ve talked about leveraging our social scheduler churchspring.com/trial, you can do that. Can we upgrade to the flourish plan? Douglas? You absolutely can. All you have to do is log into your church website and it’s pretty easy to find change plan, select the new plan you want with the flourish plan and you’re ready to go.

Isabelle Faletti (00:46:17):

Yeah. Yep. And Douglas, you’ll find that in the settings of your website and then once you click settings, you’ll have your settings dashboard and on the right side, you’ll see. I think it’s a button called managed plan. You’ll click that and then just follow the prompts. So if you have any questions or run into any issues just shoot us a support ticket in your settings and we’ll help you out there. Yeah, let’s do it. Alright. So I’m going to walk through everybody, how we can schedule website content straight, automatically to your social media channels. So I’m going to share my screen right here. I’ll take off that banner and Rohn, as you were talking or walking through the social media content calendar, I thought, Oh, that’d be so neat to do a ChurchSpring live on how to actually create all that content on your website and post that on social media.

Isabelle Faletti (00:47:13):

So on, I think it was Tuesdays, we said, let’s post your worship set list. You can create a blog article and automatically have that push out on your social media. So my brain over here was just exploding all the ideas, but for now we are just going to focus here on social media scheduler. So as Rohn mentioned, the social media scheduler is available in our top plan, the flourish level. Yes, you can upgrade at any time any coupon codes that you’ve used will automatically transfer over with you. And also any content by the way that you have on your website that sticks with your website. So you won’t lose anything. I know that I’ve had some customers reach out concerned about that and that that stays with you. So our social media scheduler is an amazing tool that will truly save you so much time and stress. And it’s built right within your website. So you don’t have to have 15 tabs run. That’s how many tabs he closed today when we were preparing for our ChurchSpring Live. So cutting out one tab

Rohn Gibson (00:48:21):

I still have 15 open, I think I eliminated about 45. So I don’t know if there’s any other tab addicts out there, hopefully I’m not alone in that

Isabelle Faletti (00:48:30):

You guys need a support group. So with the social media scheduler, you can automatically schedule your sermons, your blog articles and your events. So you can schedule those updates to your Facebook and your Twitter accounts. I’ll show you the technical aspect of how you can connect those accounts. But first I want to show you how easy it is to schedule a, a sermon on my sermons page here to Facebook or Twitter. So your first step is that you will need to create your sermon event or blog article. So I’m just going to go into my summer series sermon that I have already created here. And we have another, we have a couple other ChurchSpring Lives that we talk about sermons. So if you have questions about sermons, let us know, we can send you some resources for that.

Isabelle Faletti (00:49:27):

But you would just scroll down to the bottom of your section here. And you’ll see social media schedule for this event, sermon, blog, et cetera. I actually went ahead and I already scheduled a post on July six so that you could see when you do schedule content and it’s it’s in the past, you will still see it and this little social timeline. So you won’t have to be wondering, Oh, did we schedule a post on Facebook for that sermon? And instead of having to scroll through on your Facebook page, because if you’re posting consistently, you can be scrolling for awhile. You can just go to that sermon you then or blog and check it out here. And you’ll see the date and that it’s faded out. And you’ll be able to see that it did post. So that’s a really cool feature that I personally love to add or to schedule a new post you’ll simply click the plus icon on this little timeline, and then you’ll select the media profile that you want to post on.

Isabelle Faletti (00:50:29):

So you can select you there, your Facebook or Twitter account, you can choose both. You don’t have to choose either or it automatically connects to your accounts that you’ve already set up in your website settings, you select the post date. So let’s say if I want something to post tomorrow, Friday at, let’s say 10, am I or, yep, let’s go 10:00 AM. You can use lists like that post time. And then we also have different post types. So you can select a link post. And that right here, you’ll see that example. You can add some texts, listen to our new sermon. And then it also pulls this the, the text description from your sermon description that you updated up here. So same thing with an event or a blog. It’ll pull about the first sentence or so in this description here, and then you also have the option just to select the image without that description.

Isabelle Faletti (00:51:38):

Or you can even just select a text. And this will not link back to that event, sermon or blog. But it’s a great way if you just want to schedule something to be pushing out that’s related to this sermon or related to your church. So I’ll go back to the link posts. That’s personally my favorite. I think it gives it kind of social best practices. It gives the visitor a sneak peek and encourages them to click through. So you can, again, type any texts that you want here. And then all you have to do is click schedule posts and you will hit save. Okay. And so you’ll see here that since I selected both Facebook and Twitter, it automatically I’m scheduled on Facebook, my Facebook page and on my Twitter account. And you can see there, we have little icons that will let you know at a quick glance, which channel it’s posting to you’ll hit save, and that’s all you need to do.

Isabelle Faletti (00:52:41):

You just scheduled two posts on two different channels, right within your website. You can click to edit your sermon and you can take a look at any scheduled events that you have. And again, any previous scheduled posts. So it’s so, so simple. I love it. If you are on the flourish plan, I want you this week. I want you to go in and schedule something on your Facebook page. Whether it’s a sermon event or blog, it takes a couple of seconds. So amazing feature. I love it. I want to show you real quick, how to set that up. So it will be in your settings of your website. And again, I’m on the flourish plan right now. So if you’re on our sprouts or grow your settings, we’ll be at the top right section. You’ll click into the website tab, click the social media option.

Isabelle Faletti (00:53:36):

And here again, if you have Flourish, you’ll see two options, social media information and social media scheduling. So if you’re wanting to set up your social media scheduler, so what I just showed you where you can automatically post that to your Facebook page then you will follow the prompts here that will say click to connect your account. So I’ve already connected my account. So it says click to disconnect. But you’ll simply click this Facebook, Twitter icon, a pop up will appear follow those prompts and you can select one channel for each, or I’m sorry, one account for each channel. For Facebook, it cannot be a private account. And I mean, you wouldn’t want that. You want to be posting or connecting your church Facebook page, or even maybe your church Facebook group, if that’s how you’re set up right now.

Isabelle Faletti (00:54:29):

So follow those prompts. If you have any questions about this, send in a ticket because we want to make sure that you can set it up. It’s, it’s an easy process, but again, if you have any, any, if you run into any issues, reach out to us and we’ll help you with that. The other thing that Rohn actually mentioned in his action steps, and that was to add your social media links to your website. So the awesome thing about ChurchSpring is that we make it really easy for you to add those social media website links. You don’t have to add some new separate plugin. All you have to do is in the same section in your settings website tab, social media in the social media information block, you’ll simply add your social media platform links for your church account.

Isabelle Faletti (00:55:22):

So for ChurchSpring I just wanted to grab, so why should say for if, if you, if you’re new to Facebook, even if that’s one of your action steps, create a Facebook page for your church, you’ll go ahead, create your Facebook page. We could even do another Facebook live for that. And to grab your URL for your Facebook page, you just grab what’s in the search bar right here. So just copy that and then go over to your ChurchSpring website, and then you can paste that entire link in your social media information. That’s the easiest way. So typing it in same thing with your Twitter account, with your YouTube and Instagram account, go to that platform, copy that URL, and then paste it in here. And again, you want your church’s social platforms on this social media information, not your personal platforms.

Isabelle Faletti (00:56:17):

So you’ll always hit the save button. And then when you go back to your website, I’ll show you where those social media buttons are automatically updated and we’ll link to your social accounts. So we follow website best practices. We add the web, your social media icons to the footer throughout your entire website. And when someone clicks on your Facebook social icons here, it will automatically link them to that social account. So I have slow wifi here with live streaming. So it’s kind of slow to pull up here, but whatever you’re linking to it’ll pull up. And if you ever change your social handle, your, your, your social name URL, you can just go to your settings, update that URL, and it will update across your website automatically. So super simple, easy. If you have not set up your social accounts on your website, go ahead and do that today because it takes, I mean, 60 seconds, not even and that can help integrate all of your online presence. There’s a lot of information. I hope everybody’s still with me.

Rohn Gibson (00:57:33):

Yes, they are. This is awesome. Well, very good. Thank you so much for walking through that. And I think we’ve demonstrated both from a content strategy, as well as in the tool itself, how you can very quickly and easily get those pieces of content scheduled to make it super actionable, super easy to implement, and now it’s time to execute on those things. So that’s our encouragement for you is to go and do that real quickly. Again, for those that are watching that maybe aren’t currently on their flourish plan. If you are a church current ChurchSpring member, go ahead and upgrade to the flourish plan and you’ll have access to everything that Isabelle just shared. And like, I like I shared earlier, but I don’t think I quite landed the plane. So I wanted to circle back around to that is that we are going to be increasing the price of the flourish plan in the not so distant future.

Rohn Gibson (00:58:22):

So to lock-in your price where your price won’t increase, even as we add all these new features that are coming down the pike, go ahead and upgrade. Now, if you wait to upgrade later, you may be paying a little bit more for it. So just want to throw that out there for those that want to take advantage of that, start utilizing that tool and also take advantage of the savings. So power packed episode, lots of information today. Again, you can go check out the show notes for this, as well as download the 101 free social media posts. You can do that on our website at churchspring.co/csl007. That will be posted very shortly after we end our live today. So hopefully that was helpful. It’s been so cool hanging out with you guys next week. We’ve got another great episode coming up.

Rohn Gibson (00:59:14):

Can we talk a lot about as we set goals that there’s metrics and there’s things that we look at. So week’s episode, we’re going to talk about how to track the performance of your church website and how you can better serve your new visitors and existing church members based on your website analytics. So you don’t want to miss this. We’re going to cover a lot of great information. Many of you may not even be utilizing the tool called Google analytics, but it’s free. And it’s a tool that can give you tons of insight on how your website is currently performing and what are some of the changes you need to make to help you accomplish the goal that you want for that number one outcome of your church website. So don’t miss don’t miss be there. We will be posting and sending out an email.

Rohn Gibson (01:00:04):

If you have questions, specific questions, please let us know those ahead of time or even post them in the comments. That would be awesome. You’re very welcome, Nikki. We love that you’re here. So it’s again, it’s great to see we’ve got like regulars. I feel like we’re like a restaurant that has like regulars that are coming. So it was great to see you again here today. Excuse me. So God bless you all have a wonderful rest of your week. And again, if you are not currently on the flourish plan, go take advantage of it and get posting and leveraging the incredible tool that social media is. So thanks everyone. Have a great rest of your day.

Isabelle Faletti (01:00:43):

Thank you so much. Bye!

• Welcome to ChurchSpring Live, Episode 007 – What to expect (00:00)
• Does my church really need to use social media? (07:32)
• Do I need a church website if I have a Facebook page? (14:37)
• How should I interact with social media on my church website? (21:01)
  • Setup website links to your active social media channels
  • Create a social media content calendar
  • Sign up for a free demo webinar at churchspring.com/demo
  • Try us out for free at churchspring.com/trial
• ChurchSpring How To: Social Media Scheduling (48:30)
  • Easily schedule sermons, events, and blog articles to post to your social channels right within your website! Save time, stress
  • How to set up Social Media Channels and Social Scheduler Integration
•  Wrap Up (057:33)
  • Join us next week to learn how to track the performance of your church website—and how you can better serve your new visitors and church members based on your website analytics.