When you plan social media, can you create a month’s worth of social media in less than 20 minutes?
Church Comm Team can. We use the three E’s: Events, Encouragement, & Engagement.
We sit down every month to plan the entire next month of social media for each client. We take a look at what’s coming up and what initiatives the pastor wants to hit and put that side-by-side with your sermon series calendar to guide us. Then we start putting content types from these three categories on the calendar…
Events
First, we put events for the month on the calendar. Then we work backward and place posts before and after the events that will be used as promotional. We’ll decide what they actually look like later.
Remember to follow the 80/20 rule. Only about 20% of your social posts should be promotional and you should not post the same images or videos over and over or followers will treat you like any other spam account selling Ray-Bans and unfollow you.
Encouragement
Second, we put encouraging posts in the calendar about 2-3 times a week. These posts encourage followers to be like Christ or live out your church’s values. Scriptures, quotes, & life change stories are good examples.
Telling a really great life-change story can inspire someone, but adding a related call to action inspires them to take that specific action. So make sure you connect an action step to these posts or you’re going to miss a big opportunity for motivating people.
Engagement
Last, we pepper in engagement posts in whatever gaps are left. These are the questions, polls, contests, or conversational posts designed to get people talking. It’s always good to look at your sermon series and tailor these questions to that week’s topic. In fact, it’s a good idea to do that for the encouragement posts too, if you can.
These may seem trivial, but if you’ve got a class for Financial Peace University coming up, instead of telling them about the boring details, ask them a question like “What’s the worst purchase you’ve ever made?” and direct them to the class in a tongue-in-cheek way in the caption.