Cracking the social media puzzle: Here’s 7 ideas for your church

Running out of good church social media ideas?

It’s important that your posts actually make a difference. Your members are getting together regularly on their favorite social media channels to be entertained, challenged and informed. So the local church needs to be present with the right content.

Statista reports 82% of Americans use social media. It’s the way many start and finish their day. But it’s challenging to come up with church social media ideas that truly engage members.

Instead, it often turns into straight promotion. And rarely does anyone tune into any media offering only ads. The church, full of content that matters, needs to do better.

Here are 7 church social media ideas that will actually make a difference — for the church and community.

1. Highlight ministries. Focus on more than just events. Take pictures or videos of the way lives are being changed through ministries, and create posts that will challenge people to join in. Cleverly include in each post who it’s for, a clear benefit of participating and a link to the ministry’s webpage.
2. Pull sermon illustrations. Listen during sermons for illustrations and illustrate them. Show visually what the pastor talked about and post a summary of the story, or show an edited video of the pastor sharing it. Include a link to the entire sermon (for context) and give a time-code so they can easily find it.
3. Entertain around your thread. Your church should be known for something beneficial and needed. Let’s call it a “thread” because it weaves through all ministries and makes your mission practical. Since social media followers like to be entertained, put a smile on their faces with posts around the thread.
4. Request volunteers. Most ministries need more volunteers, so show opportunities or picture volunteers doing a great job and link to your church’s volunteer opportunities webpage.
5. Ask questions about the sermon series. Coordinate with the pastor to ask pertinent questions to set up the upcoming sermon or the one that just happened. Struggle with post engagement? Ask volunteers to prime the pump with a few answers. That’ll push the post to more people.
6. Highlight community impact. You are impacting your community, aren’t you? Take pictures of your community and how your church is helping. Even a member in a customer service job shows community influence. It doesn’t have to be something controlled by church leadership.
7. Tell a story of change. Talk to church members (or leaders); you’ll hear lots of church social media ideas from the way God is moving or challenging them. Share stories, in text or video. Stories inspire like public testimonial times did (or do). Just edit them to something concise.

Mark MacDonald is communication pastor, speaker, consultant, bestselling author, church branding strategist for BeKnownforSomething.com and executive director of the Center for Church Communication, empowering 10,000+ churches to become known for something relevant (a communication thread) throughout their ministries, websites and social media. His book, “Be Known for Something,” is available at BeKnownBook.com.