I recently started running my church’s social media accounts, and I’ve been having a blast diving into the world of social media strategy for churches! Whether or not you’ve worked in the social media world before, planning social media posts for churches is a whole different ball game.
You don’t have to be an expert in graphic design, social media, or marketing to effectively run your church’s Facebook or Instagram accounts. With a few simple tips (and some help from automation), you can easily start posting on socials and engage with your followers!
Social Media Strategy for Churches
Creating a social media strategy is key to seeing success on any social platform. Whether you’re on TikTok, Facebook, or Instagram, you can utilize these strategy tips!
Find Your Voice and Style
When posting on social media, you should have a distinct style and voice that you abide by. These are common terms when referring to your church brand—which is how people perceive you. This concept of brand voice bleeds into the style of imagery you share, the fonts you use, and the captions you post.
The easiest way to do this is to figure out a few words that describe your church and how you want people to view you. You might want to be real, organic, and witty or reverent, historic, and devout. There’s really no wrong answer, and it will be different for each church!
Define a Purpose for Each Post
Randomly sharing posts on social isn’t the worst thing in the world—at least you’re posting!—but having a strategy and purpose for each post will really make a difference in your content.
We categorize posts by whether they’re for education, information, or engagement purposes.
- Education: sharing our beliefs and mission as well as definitions of church terms and seasons of the Church Year
- Information: letting people know about an upcoming event, a change in our worship schedule, etc.
- Engagement: highlighting our volunteers, creating shareable content like Bible verses or sermon clips, or appreciation for our community
Share a Next Step
In almost every social post, I try to include a next step. Commonly referred to as a call to action in the marketing world, it’s basically the action you want people to take after they view your social post.
Here are a few of my favorite calls to action for social media posts:
- Join us for worship
- Sign up for emails
- Register for the event
- Invite a friend
- Email our pastor
- Send this post to a friend
Create a Content Calendar
Creating a social media content calendar is the easiest way to organize your ideas and schedule your posts. There are content calendars and scheduling software, but I find that Google Sheets works just as well—it’s free, and you can invite other volunteers and staff to collaborate.
Social Media Post Ideas for Churches
These are just a few of my favorite posts to share on Facebook and Instagram, but you can find 100 more social media post ideas in our previous blog post!
Share Your Worship Schedule
Each week, we share our upcoming worship schedule and setlist on Facebook. We include the Scripture our pastor will be preaching on, the songs we’ll be singing, and what time everything starts.
While members will already know what time your worship services and Bible classes start, visitors will appreciate the heads-up. And, it gives guests a chance to listen to your songs or hymns ahead of time so they can be somewhat familiar with them!
Explain a Church Term
When I’m ideating what to post on my church's social media account, I try to have a guest-first approach, thinking about what a first-time visitor to my church would want to see on our socials. One thing I think confuses a lot of people who haven’t been to church in a while (or ever) is the amount of church terms!
To combat this and educate visitors without making them feel silly for not knowing the term, we’re planning to share definitions of commonly used terms, such as sanctification, grace, and repentance. In addition to the definition, we’ll share what this term means for you as a Christian!
Advertise an Upcoming Event
Sharing an upcoming church event on Facebook is a great social media post idea! Not only does this drive people to register for an event and invite their friends, but it also allows you to reach your greater community. When people browse for events near them, your event will appear!
If you don’t have the bandwidth to create and manage a Facebook event, you can also just create an image with all the necessary details! Be sure to include how they can reach out if they have any questions.
Pray for a Current Event
One trend I’ve seen among churches is sharing custom-written prayers for a current event. Especially on Instagram, I love the idea of sharing a multi-slide post with the first slide being a simple “A Prayer for Good Friday” and the subsequent slide being a two to three sentence prayer.
You can share prayers for holidays (like Independence Day), seasons of the Church Year (like Lent), or Feast Days (like Trinity Sunday). If you’re writing these prayers and you’re not a pastor, we recommend running these by your pastor for approval before posting just to be safe!
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