How To Create Sermon Clips For Social Media That Will Go Viral
Short vertical videos are now becoming a central part of any church social media strategy for outreach. Why? Because we are in the discovery era, rather than the social era. In the discover era the social media platforms will place content in-front of audiences they think will engage with the content. Because of this your sermon clip has more potential to go viral.
Why make a shorter sermon video reel?
Apart from what I wrote above about the discovery opportunities, we live in an era where our attention spans are much shorter and actually we would do well to highlight and impactful point the preacher was making to the congregation.
In other words, just get to the point preacher! As my friend Dave Adamson says, we live in a YouTube world where people are used to shorter content.
Step 1: Choose A Video Clip Editor
There are a few cool browser based video editor ai tools for churches that will help you turn your sermons into shareable videos that will reach more people. They have the capacity to create clips for all the major social media platforms like Instagram Reels, TikTok, Youtube Shorts and Facebook Reels. Here are some that I have tested and used to create videos for posting to social media.
Post Sunday
Pulpit.ai
Church.Tech
Opus Clip
I’m not going to review them in this post. Explore them all and learn the strengths and weaknesses in each product. All these products have other great features as well which I will write about in another post.
Step 2: Create Your BrandKit
Most of the good ai-powered sermon editor tools have brandkits. Once they are set up, you don’t have to think about fonts or colours for your captions and logos each time you create a reel. This saves your valuable digital ministry time.
Step 3: Upload Your Sermon
What I love about these tools is that when you upload original content from your Sunday service like your sermon they will automatically select what they think are some of the main points and create engaging clips using the AI powered software.
You can also upload any devotional thoughts that you have shot on video too. Don’t just think about sermons!
Why Use AI-Powered Sermon Clips
Some of you may be put off by the use of AI. But when you are harnessing the power of AI in the right way in your video editing, it will act as an assistant video editor (Not your Video Director) clipping you some of the best bits and save time for you to spend working on other things. I watch all our sermons every week, four times every weekend, so I always know what those points are. And so far, they are always matching what I have written down as what are best the shareable moments we should be posting across social media platforms.
It’s important to grasp this key difference to use it as an assistant rather than a Director.
How To Make Your Video Clips Go Viral
You can actually help your content go further. For example on YouTube in the studio it will tell you the best times to post when your audience is online. That is a great start as it gives your video clip a good head start and if it resonates with them and they engage with it, then it will travel beyond your audience to more people.
A second factor is to test different types of content. Sermon clips is what I have referenced above. But there is so much more content you can post. For example, I find worship video shorts on YouTube go further than sermon video shorts on YouTube. We’ve had the occasional piece of worship content go well beyond our existing audience.
A third factor can be seasonality. If you post types of content in the right season you can trend jack the season and your content will go much further. For example. We love creating Christmas carols clips in the lead up to Christmas and they always go further than our existing audience. And they do it again the following Christmas as well.
There is no secret formula go making your content go viral, but you can give it a good push!