In this modern, Internet landscape, churches absolutely can take advantage of social media to spread their message and connect with a wider group of people than ever. But there are pitfalls to using social media that you need to be aware of. This post will clarify those pitfalls and explain how to avoid them.
What are the mistakes churches make with social media? Churches that make social media mistakes fall into two general categories: 1) Procedural mistakes that interfere with effective social media usage, and 2) Safety mistakes which can get a church into trouble if not fixed. For each category, these are the more specific mistakes:
Procedural Mistakes –
- Lack of a Posting Schedule
- Lack of Interaction with follows and subscribers
- Ignoring Stats
- Granting access to social accounts to too many people
Safety Mistakes –
- Posting pictures without permission…especially of children
- Posting controversial content without forethought
- “Feeding the trolls”
Let’s talk about the situations where each mistake can occur and how to fix it, or better yet, avoid it altogether.
Procedural Mistake: Lack of Posting Schedule
Regardless of the social media platform a church uses to spread their message (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.), followers respond best with consistency. By consistency, I mean the content a church publishes is visible to subscribers on a reliable schedule with some degree of frequency.
It’s a mistake to ask your regular attenders and church members to “follow” the church for regular updates and either spam them with massive amounts of content to the point where truly important messages get lost in the noise, or post so rarely that those who do follow forget you’re there.
The solution to both correct and prevent this mistake is to develop a Posting Schedule. A Posting Schedule is not a complicated thing to put together. It’s truly just a calendar that you follow “religiously” (no pun intended) with reminders to post content.
There is no hard rule about how often a church should post. It’s a range.
10 times a day is too much but once every 10 days is too little. Depending on the message your church is trying to get out, once a day is fine for most purposes. You can increase that frequency if you’re trying to drive up enthusiasm for a special event like a fundraiser or a special dinner, but that should be the exception and not the rule.
Procedural Mistake: Lack of interaction with follows and subscribers
This mistake is a common one because of the financial cost involved. Many churches will start to think of sending out posts to followers on social media as a sort of free advertising. Truthfully, yes, social media can be a powerful platform for getting the word out with no cost, but that’s not what makes social media so valuable. The value comes in with the interaction with your followers.
Let’s say I’m a pastor and I’m trying to get the word out about a charity auction that will help pay for repairs to the church’s heating system. I start putting out posts, hashtags, or any other social message I can to let people know.
Now let’s say, my followers start replying to my messages with questions about the auction such as time, location, or better yet, a desire to donate more items to auction off.
If you’re not paying attention to those questions, a very important opportunity to clarify your message could get missed. Or, you could lose out on feedback from a potential buyer that would make your event better than you had planned. Worse still, lack of interaction on the church’s part to an important question or bit of feedback leaves an impression that the church doesn’t care or, at least, chooses not to listen.
The point of a social platform is to interact. The last thing a church wants to do is give the impression that they don’t care what your followers have to say.
The solution to fix this mistake is also the prevention, but one will take a lot longer than the other. Simply put, read and respond to your followers when they have something to say. If a church is just getting started on it’s social accounts, that helps keep your followers engaged right from the very beginning. Unfortunately, if a church has been posting content for some time and developed a pattern of not responding, start interacting but just know it will take much longer for followers to trust a church is actually listening.
A STRONG Word of Warning here. Interacting with followers can take up a lot of time if a church doesn’t keep the time commitment in check. Leverage the Posting Schedule I discussed above and block off some time for interaction beyond posting new messages or content. An hour a day is plenty.
Procedural Mistakes: Ignoring stats
I touched on this briefly in my other post which you can get to here (Should Churches Use Twitter?) but as with all marketing activities, a church should measure how they’re doing. A church should never use social media just to use because it’s “cool” or “the thing to do.” A church should always post and interact with a goal in mind.
The myriad of social platforms all have some type of Analytics to help the church understand what posts are getting the most interaction with their followers, or which posts are getting shared the most. That information is key to understanding what messages resonate with your church body when they are living their lives out in the world and not sitting in the pews. Ignore this information at your peril.
I can’t tell a church what goals they should set when it comes to social media success, but they should think about and write down key questions to understand better what’s on the mind of their followers. Questions such as:
What posts are church attenders sharing the most with their friends and family?
What posts are sparking the most passionate online discussions?
What days and times are regular attenders most active with the church’s posts? Is that a key timeframe to reach them with important church matters?
Which posts are not receiving any interaction at all and don’t seem to be engaging with the church body?
Can the church reach out to regular attenders on these questions as a form of focus group outreach to understand how the church needs to serve its community better?
Obviously, the solution to this mistake is to look at the stats. If a church is technical enough to understand how to post on social media but finds reading and interpreting the analytics a bit too much, seek the help of a professional. You can always reach out to me via email here: [email protected]
One caveat to keep in mind with this solution. Stats take a little time to build up. If a church is looking for deep insight about their posts after only posting for two days, there’s not going to be enough data to deliver meaningful reports. The best thing to do when just starting out is to verify analytics are turned on and give it at least a few weeks of consistent posting before looking for trends in the data.
Procedural Mistake: Granting access to social accounts to too many people
This is a common mistake to make especially among smaller churches with a small staff. It’s the old “too many cooks in the kitchen” problem.
Unless you have one person that writes all the posts and you have multiple people on the church staff to do nothing but publish the content, keep the account access limited to one or a few personnel. If not, there is a risk of multiple people posting some version of the same message at the same time and those messages may not have the same information. This creates confusion among your followers.
There is a way to grant multiple people access to a church’s social media accounts without creating conflict and overlap. Make each person with access responsible for a specific type of post.
For example, you can have “Bob” responsible for posting anything related to church hours, especially on days with inclimate weather. You can then have “Sara” responsible for posting anything related to children’s church and daycare. These are very specific examples, but the idea here is to create categories of content postings and delegate those posting types to separate individuals so that the messages remain consistent and clear.
We’re talking here about the “too many cooks” problem, but there is another problem if you go too far in the opposite direction.
If all accounts are managed by a single person, a church runs the risk of losing access to those accounts if that person leaves or gets sick. Always have at least one person as a back up that knows how many social media accounts a church has, what the passwords are, and can pick up on the Posting Schedule without too much delay.
Safety Mistake: Posting pictures without permission…especially of children
When I talk to churches about best practices for safety online, this one mistake seems to occur to the average church the least but it has the potential to be the most dangerous.
Absolutely, 100%, do NOT post picture of attenders – especially children – on the church’s social media accounts with that adult’s permission or the permission of that child’s parent.
Here’s why…
Families are not perfect. Marriages go bad. Abuse happens. And it is the church’s responsibility to not do anything that could put those that have been harmed in a domestic situation to wind up back in that domestic situation.
One great feature of the technology underneath these social media platforms is they have the ability to tag time and location of postings and photos. Sometimes the account owner may not even realize it’s happening. So, if I post a picture of children attending a church event to Facebook as an example, Facebook can pick up the time, date and location of that child.
When you have a difficult domestic situation occurring that involves children like a custody fight, the last thing a church wants to do is tip off a potentially abusive parent where a child might be out of the protection of their other parent.
It’s a grave thought, and sadly, one that churches don’t think about when posting picture of kids having fun at camp. It seems innocent, and it is, but a church needs to be aware of the potential for danger, however innocent the intention.
Always, always, always get permission first before posting pictures of attenders and their children. When in doubt, just don’t post the picture. Yes, it’s fun to share pictures of attenders having a great time at a church event, but the risk is real and not worth it.
Safety Mistake: Posting controversial content without forethought
This is another one I mentioned on my post about Twitter (Should Churches Use Twitter?), and it’s a deceptively easy mistake to make.
A church’s message is typically focused on the Word, without getting into the details of each denomination. That said, the vision and mission of the church can come into alignment with certain political views or political figures or celebrities. Posting content in social media that gives the impression of aligning or even siding with political figures, activists, or celebrities could instigate disagreement among the church followers and potentially the church staff.
Unless the content is as vanilla as possible, think ahead to the reception and reaction of content that touches on sensitive topics or political issues. For example:
Abortion is a passion topic for most churches. If a church posts content about abortion, and the content posted is not consistent with the church’s doctrine and/or seemingly endorses a public figure that might be considered divisive, the church could appear to be pushing a separate and distinct agenda other than the one church leadership and the pastor intend. It’s a slippery slope that risks creating disagreement among the church body and the staff.
That’s not to say a church shouldn’t post content on sensitive topics. That is to say the reception and reaction should be considered very carefully.
It wouldn’t be fair to advise against posting on sensitive topics, so the best solution to avoid this mistake is to make sure the drafted content is reviewed by one or more church leaders for acceptability. That said, if you make this mistake, you run the risk of walking into the next mistake…
Safety Mistake: “Feeding the Trolls”
Oh, boy! There are a lot of people on the Internet that have very bad opinions on just about every topic and they’ve taken it upon themselves to share those awful opinions with everyone every chance they get. This type of person is known as a “troll”.
Trolls love to reply and respond to every post with antagonistic words for the express purpose of getting the original poster and other followers agitated. Trolls take amusement out of getting other people angry. It’s a form of power play to feel like you can manipulate somebody into an extreme emotional reaction.
Trolls lurk on every social platform. They pop up when a church least expects it. They won’t leave if you ask them to, and Social Platform managers won’t remove them unless their actions rise to the level of harassment. Unfortunately, most social platforms do not have a clear definition of harassment so your results may vary.
If a church encounters a troll responding to one of their posts, particularly one on a sensitive topic, do not engage the troll by correcting or arguing back aka feeding. Trolls love the attention.
Should a church mistakenly feed a troll, the best and only course is to ignore them or block them. Every social platform has some of type of /block/ignore/mute function. Learn to use it, but only when needed.
Remember trolls feed off the agitation and attention. A church cannot stop trolls from appearing but they can limit their presence by not engaging them. No attention means no fun, and eventually the troll will just move on.
I hope you found this article useful. If you have any comments or questions, please contact me at [email protected] .
Related questions
Which social media platform should churches use?: All social media platforms have the potential to ge the Word out for a church. If the goal is to interact with the widest range of people, Facebook is your best bet. If a church wants to record message for mass consumption, YouTube is the strongest video platfor right now. For audio only aka podcasts, there is no clear “best” platform but the main players are iTunes and Spotify.
