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Who We Are Barry Hill is the President and Founder of Bright Salt Media Labs. For more than a decade Barry has been partnering with churches, ministries and organizations to build digital communication strategies, tell better stories and nurture their communities. Barry has worked as a Youth Pastor for nearly two decades, has his bachelor s degree from Eastern University in Youth Ministry, and his Master of Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary. James Trent is lead designer at Bright Salt. His passion is for creating meaningful digital experiences, and for making things that help people. James enjoys web design and development, graphic design, photography, video production, and digital strategy and marketing. In his spare time James enjoys tennis and ping pong. Bright Salt was founded in 2015 when we began offering digital strategy consulting and implementation services to a few nonprofits and ministries. As it turns out, digital strategy works just as well for smaller organizations as it does for the big ones in many cases even better. We ve seen our clients reach and impact grow significantly through our digital strategy services. Interested in working with us? Feel free to get in touch.
INTRODUCTION Introduction WHY SOCIAL MEDIA? How does your church see? Most churches dramatically underestimate. Let me show you what I mean. Social is one of the tools with the most ministry potential available to you. 72% of American adults are on Facebook. 70% of users log in daily, and 43% do so multiple times a day. Facebook is the best use of your online resources no matter the average age of your church. American Adults not on Facebook on Facebook With so many people active on, it s an opportunity with huge ministry potential. You can target people involved in your church, helping them be more engaged in the life of the church. But you can also target the broader local community: friends of your church members, people in the area, families new to the area. The outreach opportunities are almost endless. With such a powerful tool at our disposal, the Church should view this as an issue of stewardship. Will we make good use of this tool for the Kingdom? We wrote this guide to help you do this. Maybe you re thinking, I understand has potential. But we ve tried it, and it just hasn t worked for our church. It can certainly be frustrating when you invest a lot of time and effort into and don t see any results. However, other churches and ministries are seeing amazing results with. If you re not seeing results, we have good news: it simply means your strategy needs to be adjusted. And we re here to help you do that.
INTRODUCTION WHO THIS GUIDE IS FOR If you work in communications,, or outreach for your church in a paid or volunteer role this guide is for you. We created this guide to help churches who are already using in a very basic manner, but who want to unlock more potential and results than they re seeing currently. Thus, we assume you ve done the following: You have a church Facebook page. (Don t have one yet? Here s how to get one.) Your church has a person assigned to manage the church s Facebook page. (that s you) You re trying to post once a week or more - either successfully or not. YOU ALREADY... 1. Have a Facebook page 2. Have someone running the page 3. Are trying to post 1x/week or more If you re not doing these things, read this article and you ll be up and running in no time. If that s Facebook 101, this guide could be called Church Facebook 201. We ll take you beyond the basics, but we ll keep it simple to understand and take action. By the end of this guide, you ll be empowered to use Facebook much more powerfully and get more results out of your time invested.
TABLE OF CONTENTS Table of Contents (clickable :) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 FIND YOUR BEST POSTING TIMES SCHEDULE YOUR POSTS ADD A BUTTON TO YOUR FACEBOOK PAGE BOOST POSTS THE SMART WAY LEARN ABOUT YOUR AUDIENCE WITH INSIGHTS CREATE HIGH-QUALITY GRAPHICS TO INCREASE ENGAGEMENT 3 TYPES OF POSTS THAT ENGAGE YOUR AUDIENCE
FIND YOUR BEST POSTING TIMES 1 Tip #1 FIND YOUR BEST POSTING TIMES Using Facebook Insights, you can find the times of day when your audience is most likely to interact with your content. STEP 1 Go to your page. Click Insights at the top menu, then click Post Engagements. Facebook will show you a graph showing the top days and times people are engaging with your posts. ACTION STEP Pick the two times with the highest amount of engagement. Note those, we ll use them in the next step when we schedule posts.
SCHEDULE YOUR POSTS IN ADVANCE 2 Tip #2 SCHEDULE YOUR POSTS IN ADVANCE Never worry about remembering to post again! Using Facebook s native scheduler, you can schedule all your posts up front - and you don t even need a third-party app to do it. Here s how. STEP 1 Go to your page. Click Publishing Tools at the top menu, then click Scheduled posts on the left. This will show you all your scheduled posts. STEP 2 Click the + Create button and create a post just like you normally would. STEP 3 When you re done, click Schedule, and select the date and time you want it to go live! ACTION STEP Remember your audience s two most active times? Create and schedule two posts for those two times.
ADD A CTA BUTTON TO YOUR PAGE 3 Tip #3 ADD A CALL-TO-ACTION BUTTON TO YOUR FACEBOOK PAGE A Call To Action, or CTA, is an important part of every website. But CTAs are also useful on your facebook page. Facebook has a feature which lets you add a big blue call to action button in a prominent area of your page. Let s set one up. STEP 1 Go to your page. Click the big blue button, Add a Button. There are a few options here. If you want this button to take people to your website, that s under Learn More About Us --> Learn More. There are also options to ask people to call you, email you, or send you a message. If you have a video, you may want to have the button point to the video. ACTION STEP Choose a call-to-action button for your Facebook page and add it.
WHEN & HOW TO BOOST POSTS 4 Tip #4 WHEN & HOW TO BOOST POSTS Confused about boosting posts? Not anymore! You can totally do this. If you ve never created a Facebook ad before, boosting a post is a great way to get started. Why? Because it s dead-simple, and almost impossible to mess up. Start with boosting a post by $5 or $10, and see what kind of results you get. WHAT TYPES OF POSTS SHOULD I BOOST? We ve seen great results with boosting videos. Posts with images or graphics are also a great candidate to boost, as they usually get the most reach and engagement. HOW DO I MEASURE THE RESULTS? Compare the reach and engagement to that of your typical organic (unpaid) posts. Was there a significant difference? What kind of reach did the post get you? WHEN IS BOOSTING A POST WORTH IT? Think about the ROI you get from that $5-10 - not in revenue, but in brand equity and awareness. For example, we recently boosted a video for one of our clients. For $10 the video was viewed almost 800 times. Think about when this extra push would be worthwhile to you. Maybe you ve created a video, or have images from an event, that you want your whole audience to see and share. Since organic reach on Facebook is usually under 4%, these are cases when boosting might be worth it to you. Not only will a much larger portion of your audience see your content, but it ll likely also get more likes, comments, and shares - meaning more new people will see it as well. ACTION STEP Boost a Facebook post for $5 and compare the reach and engagement to what you normally get.
USING FACEBOOK INSIGHTS 5 Tip #5 LEARN ABOUT YOUR AUDIENCE WITH FACEBOOK INSIGHTS Audience Insights shows you highly specific demographics info for your page. You can use this data to tailor your content to be as useful as possible to your specific audience. STEP 1 Go to your page, click on Insights, then on People. This view will show you what percentage of your fans are male or female, along with your fans top countries, cities, and lanuages. The default view shows you statistics for people who like your page (fans), but you can also look at data for People Reached and People Engaged using the sub-menu at the top. ACTION STEP Study the Insights data you have for your page. How can you use this information to better serve and engage your audience?
CREATE HIGH- QUALITY GRAPHICS 6 Tip #6 CREATE HIGH-QUALITY GRAPHICS TO INCREASE ENGAGEMENT Graphics are a crucial element of any strategy. Following these three rules will give you a massive advantage as you start building your presence. GRAPHICS RULE #1: USE IMAGES Visual content is 40X more likely to get shared on than other types of content. 1 This isn t just true on Facebook; images generally get more engagement across all than text does. Use an image to accompany your text content whenever possible. This is a simple hack you can use to get more reach and engagement as you grow your presence. GRAPHICS RULE #2: KEEP IT SIMPLE Graphics with simple, clean feel will capture people s attention. Simpler is almost always better. Make sure your graphics convey the information in a clear and straightforward way. It should be imtely obvious to the viewer what your graphic is about. Either find someone who knows how to create graphics, or learn how to yourself. They re that important. To get you started, here are two free tools you can use to create your own graphics: Canva offers easy-to-use web-based photo editing and creation. GIMP is a free alternative to Photoshop. There is a steeper learning curve, but it gives you a lot of options.
CREATE HIGH- QUALITY GRAPHICS 6 Tip #6 CONTINUED GRAPHICS RULE #3: WATCH THE COPYRIGHT You never want to be using copyrighted images for your graphics. This is risky, and definitely not worth it in the long run. Social, and digital strategy as a whole, is a long-term play, not a short-term solution. That applies to graphics as well: always make sure you re allowed to use anything you post. If you re taking your own photos and video, that s great. A lot of organizations aren t able to do this, though. If this is the case, just make sure you re using copyright-free images. You can always buy stock photos but if you don t have the budget for that, we ve got you covered: here are three great photo sites with images that you can freely use for your graphics. 3 FREE IMAGE SITES Unsplash.com Pexels.com Pixabay.com ACTION STEP Sign up for Canva or GIMP and try creating a graphic for your page. With a little practice, this will become second nature! 1 http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/visual-content-marketing-strategy
3 TYPES OF POSTS THAT ENGAGE 7 Tip #7 3 TYPES OF POSTS THAT ENGAGE YOUR AUDIENCE POST TYPE #1: THE CURATION Content curation is incredibly easy given the ROI it provides. Simply share interesting, relevant content with your audience. They will appreciate it, and many will like and share the posts. POST TYPE #2: THE QUOTE People love quotes. This is another simple way to engage your Facebook followers. You know from tip #6 to use images, so add a relevant image alongside your quote or even better, use Canva or Gimp to integrate the quote into the image.
3 TYPES OF POSTS THAT ENGAGE 7 Tip #7 CONTINUED POST TYPE #3: THE SURVEY Ask your audience a question! This is a direct, proven way to engage your audience. People love to share their personal thoughts, opinions and ideas. This is a great way to generate discussion among your followers. ACTION STEP How can you use the above post types on your page? Challenge: create posts for all 3, and schedule them!
FIND YOUR BEST POSTING TIMES 1 Thank You! You re now on your way to killing it on! We hope you can use these 7 strategies to grow your church s influence in your community. WHAT S NEXT? Believe it or not, we ve only scratched the surface of what your church can do on. Like we said at the beginning, we think of these 7 as a kind of Church Facebook 201 course. But there s so much more to just Facebook! Not to mention Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, and so many other opportunities for the Church. These tools give us incredible potential to impact our communities for the Kingdom of God. At Bright Salt Media Labs, we feel called to help churches and ministries use these digital tools to their full potential for the gospel. If you re interested in the possibilities a digital strategy would bring to your faith community, we encourage you to explore some of the topics on our blog. These articles will deepen your knowledge of digital and give you some ideas for how your church can employ it. Click here to read our blog. HOW DO I GET STARTED? At Bright Salt Media Labs, we are happy to talk to you one-on-one about how your church can design and implement a digital strategy. Just click the button below to contact us, and we will contact you to schedule a phone call or video call. Or, you can simply reply to the email we sent you. We read every response! :) Click here to contact us.