What are some of the tricks and tips churches can use for social media to leverage their influence
online. If you're watching for the first time, I would like to welcome you to this YouTube channel.
Go ahead and click subscribe, click on the bell and also engage with me in the video. If you've
been coming and this is your channel where you consume content, thank you. Stay engaged,
let me know what you guys are using at your church for social media. Now coming back to this topic,
I believe that God called the church to reach the world and part of this evangelism strategy
is called fishing. You know, we're called to fish for souls. Now I'm not a fisherman,
but fishermen usually tell me that they have to go where the fish is. Nobody's waiting at the
house for the fish to come into their house. In fact, even Jesus says, go into all the world and
make disciples. He tells us to go. Why, because the social media. The reason why every church
supposed to be on social media, and we should be leveraging this platform is because it's the
principle of fishing. The first principle of fishing is you go where the fish are.
Where are people today. They are on their phones, they are on social media, they are
watching YouTube clips, they are on TikTok, they are on Instagram. And so, that's where churches
have to go now. Here are my practical 10 things that i want to share with you concerning media,
that i believe will be a great blessing to you and to your local church. Number one, is you have
to believe in yourself and be yourself. You know, every church is not like Elevation Church, Bethel
Church or Transformation Church but every church has something to offer that will touch their
community and will touch their society. One of the biggest challenges that we had to overcome many,
many, many years ago is honestly we have nothing to offer. Personally for me i was like man,
I'm not super good looking on the camera, I have an accent, my English is not super great and so
I'm not the right guy. I don't have a Bible degree and so I, we shouldn't be posting anything online.
But that's a lie, you know God can use you,if you simply overcome your insecurity and you remember
this, what you have is enough. And just go into posting things and creating stuff online. Remember
in social media, content is the king. Marketing is the queen. You're either remarkable or invisible.
What does that mean? That means that everyone has something to offer. Be you on social
media. Yes, you can learn and glean from other churches, but at the same time at the end of the
day there's going to be never somebody like you. So be you, do you, post things that are honestly,
only you guys are doing. Or things that are really just something that makes your church,
your church. Number two is add value to people. One of the biggest things I see with social
media and with media in general, is churches use social media to get people to their events or to
their buildings. Instead of using the media to feed people and to give people spiritual food.
So you must understand, if the only thing you're posting online, is come to this, come to this,
we invite you to this, we have a conference in five days. Then what you're doing is you're
selfish and you're not serving people. You're not adding value to people by using the platform.
You are using the platform to get everybody to come to your building and to your event.
And so, create content that blesses people and they will come to your events, they will come to
your meetings. I mean, we have people that will fly from across the world to come to our events,
but one of the reasons is that we build content that helps people. And so we try to use the 80
20 rule, which states that 80 of your content should be educational and engaging and then 20
should be promotional. And so, if you want to you know, like,even if we post about youth service
or we post something about Sunday morning. It's usually like, some kind of a cool photo,
some kind of an invite with a statement or a scripture and then at the end we post, hey join us
for our event. Or like when i try to promote my ebooks. You know i don't say, oh boy buy my ebook.
No, I post a quote from the e-book and then on the bottom i say, if you want to learn more, go to my
e-book. When I want people to come to my YouTube and watch my full sermon, I don't just post,
hey come to my YouTube and watch my full sermon. You know, i post a short little clip that whets
their appetite so then they can go and ask, hey where can I get the full message? Where can i see
the remaining of this message? So think, it's about serving, it's not about being served. This is not
a platform where you're just getting everybody to come to your events. If you're doing that,
it's a flop. It won't work, you'll be disappointed. There will be no engagement.
Number three is engage your audience. Respond to comments, answer questions, create call to action
on your content. Instagram does it so well under stories now, where you can ask for prayer,
where you can do some kind of a challenge, where you can even
have questions. You can do a little Bible quiz and so engage with people. We try to, when I post
things online, you know we try to ask, hey what do you think? Shouting amen in the comments below.
Same thing when I do streams on Thursdays. When we post things online, we ask in our comments,
hey do you agree with this, what do you think about this? We want to create an engagement
and engagement is the key, not just people to view, it not just people to see you, not just
people to follow you, that followers, subscribers. It doesn't matter. Engagement is the key and so,
try to respond to comments, answer messages, repost people's stuff and see ministry as
something that you engage online. This is not just marketing, this is not just you getting
content out. This is you engaging with people. Number four, we modify content for each platform.
We try not to copy content from one platform like Instagram straight into Facebook. For
example Instagram is more for pictures and reels .It's a new thing that they're doing
and so we try to post photos with capture captions. Use tags, location tags, people
tags and on Facebook sometimes we use different photos with the same caption. But you know we try
not to use the hashtags and if we have any links we drop them in the comments on Facebook not in
the description. Facebook does not like when you put url links in the description for some reason.
They want you to stay on Facebook, and YouTube of course is different. We post longer content,
sometimes we post shorter content. We really work on the thumbnail. We use the TubeBuddy to figure
out the best title and we try to optimize it, so that it could reach new people. We're going
to have a separate video that will deal with YouTube optimization and we will have a separate
content that will help you. I believe it's going to help a lot of churches to get their YouTube to
another level and podcast as well. You know it's a little bit different, podcast. So we create
intros and outros and we ask people to review the podcast. They review our podcast and we
try to upload it to all the platforms including Spotify so that people can do that. Number five
is boost content only that's performing well. Boosting is when you're adding a little bit of
money on the com, on the graphic or on the video or on whatever that you created, so you can get it
to more people. The problem with boosting is that if you're boosting content that is not doing well,
you know you're wasting money but sometimes you really want to promote the conference or you want
to promote an event so you don't care you just want to get to as many people as possible. So
it's different but we really believe that organic reach is the best reach without adding finances.
Viral, you know you will never go viral by boosting your content. You can go viral by just
honestly, firstly the grace of God and secondly you can find that niche. You can write the algorithm
and people engaging ,people sharing and on Instagram and Facebook and on YouTube,
you know i went on YouTube viral a few times and tiktok, you know many times and then on Instagram,
we hit i think almost like 500 000 but not necessarily more than a million. And so I'm
believing that they will still come but in order to do that, you have to be faithful and you have
to be committed. It's going to take years. Some people blow up instantly but for most of us it's
going to take faithfulness, improving and growing, for our content to reach more people. Number six,
create message trailers or message bites. So the way we have it structured at Hungry Gen,
is that we have YouTube message from YouTube message, we break it down to like two messages
of that message. We break it down to two parts for Facebook and then we take about one or two parts
for Instagram, Instagram reels or Instagram igtv. Depending on the thought, and so we kind of put
some little titles over it, put subtitles over it and then we throw that in as well as we add one or
two quotes from that message, to post during the week to draw attention to that message. So we
have both YouTube longer videos, Instagram shorter videos and then a quote from a long sermon on
YouTube. So you really have to dissect one message on Sunday and break it down into smaller pieces.
Don't just post it on YouTube and expect it to do well. It might do well if you're some known
preacher or if you're really hitting algorithm but you can break it down and feed it in the small
byte sizes on other social media platforms. Now it does require to have a team and it does require to
use maybe other companies or other businesses and you're going to have to pay a little bit but it's
worth the investment. It's worth to train the team, it's worth to raise the team, it's worth
to build volunteers. You don't have to hire for everything you can bring volunteers. It will be
more difficult, it will be a little bit more, It's going to take more time but it's worth the work.
Why? Because media is not going anywhere, because this thing with online is not going anywhere. It's
only going to get like better or worse depending on your view of it. It's going to people are
going to be more online than ever before and so we just have to take advantage of that. Number seven,
take advantage of google nonprofit ten thousand dollar grant. Yes, you heard me right. Google
offers ten thousand dollars to nonprofits as a grant. They do it as a tax write-off and this
grant, doesn't only give you an ads. Listen to me, this grant also lets you use google suite.
So it means you can, like for example, I have hello@pastorvlad.org I don't pay for that.
Otherwise i will have to pay 20 a month for just that. So that i can attach an email to my
website you know and use google as a host for my emails and so, but that is offered completely
for free for churches or for people that have non-profit and so link is below and how you take
advantage of that. I would really encourage you to take advantage of that. We actually,
in fact for my personal ministry of Vladimir Savchuk Ministry, we're hiring a person this week
just so that they could help me to write more blogs, write more content so that we can create
more ads. Because I'd rather, you know pay let's say somebody a full-time pay that they could take
advantage of the ten thousand dollar in ads that google gives us. Now there's only one trick with
this google 10 000 ad is that they have to go to your website. They cannot go to your Facebook,
they cannot go to your YouTube. They have to go to your website and they mainly target United States
and Canada and not other countries. If you start targeting other countries you will get banned, if
you target other places then your website you will also get banned from it. So the secret is this,
is you start writing blogs .Now you may say, well our church is not a blog writer. I can assure you,
your church has a lot of people who are writing blogs. You can ask them to donate one blog a month
to your website. Upload it to your website and then you can create an ad for that blog,
driving traffic to your website and then on your blog page you can have donation links,
messages and where your church meets. And you can use your blog as a way of drawing
attention to your ministry. Number eight, it's very difficult to do graphical things so
we actually outsource graphics and some videos to other companies. Currently we're using church
media squad. We use their full package. Their basic package includes unlimited graphics
and then if you want go higher you can get also one video a week one, sermon blender a month
and then they can clean up the pdfs. I think 30 pdfs a month They do really, really nice. Makes it
look like you know, you're a pro and so they do an amazing job. Honestly you can't hire a part-timer
to do what they're doing for that price. Even if you're just gonna use graphics thumbnails,
flyers, quotes of your pastor's messages, it's worth those six hundred dollars. On
the side we're also using dawa marketing. So they're doing our YouTube thumbnails. They're
kind of helping us to make them a little bit more clickbaity, a little bit more attractive
and so that they can draw more attention. I would really encourage you, you can hire
people for that price. So sometimes you know i see media teams suffer because they have
this one media person who spends eighty percent of their work on a creative aspect that they love but
the problem is they don't have time to manage the team, they don't have time to create new work and
so what they could be doing is that creating these big ideas and leveraging and outsourcing to other
companies to be able to help them with some of the graphical with some of the iinformation, excuse
me, with flyers and even with some videos. Number nine, reviews give exposure to your ministry.
It's free, you can ask your church members to leave a review on google. It will help your church
to track better on google. It's not the only thing that can help you be more searchable and
for easier for people to find but it's one of the best ways as long as you don't ask everybody
to pull their phones on the service and leave a review because the algorithm is going to see that
and it's going to ban most of the comments. So you want to send an email to your church members and
let them whenever they open it leave a review for your church because people today when they look
for the church they either listen to their friends or they go to google and they check reviews. And
number 10 take advantage of amazon smile to bring more finances to your church. You can sign up as a
non-profit with amazonsmile. smile.amazon.com and anytime your church people or your followers or
your fans they shop, what they can do is they actually you can get some donations coming your
way when they use amazon and then amazon gives a percentage to your ministry. So that's about just
10 basic things that i wanted to share and some of the things that we've been doing in HungryGen.
It's a huge component, I believe that media is not going anywhere. We're even developing
right now a virtual church. Church online. I know a lot of people are pioneering this and
so streaming is one thing but doing a separate church, just online. We have members online,
we have small groups online we have leadership online and we also have volunteering positions
online. It's a huge component that this online thing is not going anywhere and instead of us you
know fighting it, we should use it for the glory of God. What are some tips your church is using
that you would like to share with us or one of the 10 things that you heard that you've never heard?
You're like man this is crazy i need to share with my media director i need to share with my pastor
and so drop that in the comment below. Thank you for watching, until next time.