
11 Imaginative Ways To Use Social Media For Your Church
Social media can be used in many imaginative ways by churches to engage with their audiences. I’ve chosen to show you 11 examples from Facebook, but you can use Instagram, Pinterest or Twitter. It doesn’t really matter which social network you use as long as long as you are actively engaged on it. I’ve written before about how to engage on social media before. I strongly recommend you read this before you put any creative tactics in place for your church on your social media platform of choice.
I’ll let the pictures do that talking. So have a look at the pictures and ask yourself what they would look like in your church context.
1. Show how your services are put together
2. Go Behind The Scenes
3. Give A Sneek Peek
4. Celebrate Staff
5. Take Us With You
6. Celebrate Volunteers
7. Show Pastors Speaking
8. Have fun
9. Celebrate Significant Milestones
10. Ask Engaging Questions
11. Quote Scripture
These are just a few imaginative ways you can use social media for your church. You don’t have to just use these tactics on your official church feed, if you are a church leader of any level you can use these for your personal feed (see my post on how church leaders can use social media). The community that you influence will celebrate with what you are passionate about.
Your turn
These are just some of the ways you can tell the story of the life of your church. There are many more ways. What have you seen or done that you like? Comment below.
Thanks for the idea’s Steve, our church has a facebook page but has been stuggling to work out how to get the most (read: anything) out of it, so thanks for the tips!
Glad I could help Rowan!
fyi I went to crossway way back in the day before it was crossway!
I’ve really enjoyed following your blog the last couple of months. These days I go to a small church in Albury with next to no resources. I took on rebuilding the website a few years ago and have kind of become the graphic designer/database guy/anything else that you need a computer for guy! Its been a steep learning curve so checking out australian church design blogs has been a great place to learn some of the things I should be thinking about so thanks for sharing your wisdom!
Sometimes getting your “writing momentum” is the toughest part (ie What should I post on Facebook?!). Great content ideas for churches, Steve.
Thanks Drew!
Thanks for the tips. We’re just over a month away from launching out church’s social media platform. Your blog was helpful and interesting. Thx for sharing examples.
How do you deal with privacy with members of the church? For example, did you get permission to use the photo of the lady being baptised in #9? We were just talking about this today in relation to our church taking video/pics and using footage of people in promos, etc…
On all our forms we have publicity clauses requesting permission to use their images. It also helps to have signs up in the facility to let people know that cameras will be used to get footage for publicity.
Excellent ideas for getting the creative ink flowing for social media!
Just to comment on what Andrew was wondering about privacy and authorization of images: We typically find using images of members attending services and events are alright if not encouraged and desired by the member themselves. Where we find there to be major issues (even if you have clauses, etc.) is when an image is used in correspondence to copy write in the form of a quote, statement, etc. People can get really sensitive when text is applied towards them; especially if that text is even slightly wrong in any manner. Also, we make every attempt to find out who the member is and if they have an account on the same social media outlet we are posting to. This way we can “tag” them to the image/post.
Thanks again Steve for all you do, it is greatly appreciated! 🙂
We do Carols Under the Stars each year that is incredibly well received by our local community and last year we did a timelapse video of the event set-up which people really liked. We’ve also found albums- especially of weddings or church camp- always get great reach and engagement.