If you’re looking to engage others in your ministry, social media is a must. But which channel is best for your organization?
Let’s dive into the top social networks where we find the majority of ministries engaging:
I recommend that most ministries spend the majority of their time on Facebook. Unless your primary focus is teenagers, Facebook is where you are going to see the greatest engagement and the best return.
With now over two billion active users, the average Facebook user spends 20 minutes a day on the platform. This leaves huge opportunities throughout the day to engage people who are connecting on this platform, primarily from a mobile perspective.
A Facebook page is the primary platform for an organization to engage publicly. In many ways, it’s similar to your website. The difference is that it’s always updating, informing, and connecting in unique ways.
Having said that, your page is not where people are most often engaging with you… rather, it’s through their newsfeed. As you post content to Facebook, it’s thrown in with what people’s friends, family, and other pages they follow are sharing on Facebook.
Facebook has three primary platforms: Your profile (how you present yourself personally on Facebook), your Facebook groups (a place to build community and have private engagement), and lastly, your Facebook page (where you communicate publicly).
YouTube
YouTube is much more than a social network; it’s an effective video platform and its most powerful asset is search engine capabilities. YouTube is actually the number two search engine on the planet, second only to Google.
So, maximizing YouTube as a search engine is a great opportunity. And YouTube is also a powerful social network, as people can subscribe to your channel, leave comments, and build community. The longer YouTube exists, the more social in nature it becomes.
Instagram now has more than one billion active users, and it’s here that you engage others by uploading videos and pictures through mobile. Interestingly, Instagram is now actually a core part of Facebook as they’re becoming more and more integrated and connected. It’s also a powerful platform to engage a younger audience and is just a little simpler in nature.
Here, it’s all about understanding how to utilize hashtags and create content that engages people through short videos and images on a mobile device, knowing they won’t be looking at a television or a desktop computer.
Twitter has been around for a long time, and has been through some pretty significant changes. Starting out as a text-messaging platform, Twitter has now shifted out of the social media platform in the app store and into the news section.
In the past, you might have uploaded all of the same things to Facebook and Twitter, but it’s now important to think through the content you create for Twitter, considering they are looking for news and information rather than inspiration.
LinkedIn continues to grow as its focus remains on professional networking. This is your opportunity to communicate with people who are connected to your ministry professionally, and to understand their gifts and the things that are important to them. Utilizing LinkedIn and actively, personally engaging on this platform can help create unique relationships and develop those relationships in a different way than you can on other social networks.
As you think through these unique channels, I suggest staying heavily invested in Facebook, in addition to one or two other social networks.
More Insights from Dunham+Company: “How to Lead a (Productive) Meeting, Part One”