Ministering Through Social Media For Beginners
Corey Jones Interviewed by Scott Osbourne
83% of Americans have a social media account. You know it’s important to engage with students online but how do you find the time? At this Idea Lab, you will explore tips and tools to painlessly take full advantage of social media.
Why is this important?
The families in your church. 83 percent of Americans have a social media account. *Hootsuite
The families outside of your church who may one day come in. 28% of people would rather engage with a brand or organization on social media vs. visiting the physical location. *HS
Matthew 25 Jesus tells the parable of the talents
21 “His master replied, ‘You have done well, good and faithful slave! You have been faithful with a few things. I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!’ Vs. 26 “You evil, lazy slave!”
What is the Goal: Engagement – You want to be social on social media. You want people to be involved with your content. To see it, to interact.
Likes, replies, comments, shares, downloads, reads, plays, lists, pins, follows or fans, click-throughs. I love the tip that I got from Beau Coffron, the social media manager for Life Church, “Social media should be more like a telephone than a megaphone!”
Of the Social Media Giants: What is the biggest?
Text Messaging: 4.5B Active Monthly Users (https://www.statista.com/statistics Aug 2017)
97% of Americans using it at least once a day
Text messages have a 98% open rate, while email has only a 20% open rate.
90% of all text messages are read in under 3 minutes.
What is our Strategy: Change your thinking. Create a plan. What is your sequence? When you send a text, what is the response?
Facebook: 2B Active Monthly Users
70% of all Americans are active on Facebook. *Pew Research
Facebook Ads: no more yellow pages or billboards
100 million hours of video content are watched on Facebook daily. FB
What is our Strategy: Engage with families through both: Pages vs Groups
Youtube: 1.5B Active Monthly Users — almost one-third of all people on the Internet — and everyday people watch hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube and generate billions of views.
2nd biggest search engine
What is #1 viewed video? Despacito 3.94B views. Posted January 12, 2017, and amassed 1B views in 97 days. And August 4, 2017, passed 3B views making it the most viewed video on youtube.
Who have you subscribed to?
Who do your students and parents watch?
What is our Strategy: Engage with your volunteers by posting “How to” videos
What about a Strategy for students: Engage with your students by posting videos they would like to share with friends. Videos of them. Testimonies.
Instagram: 700M Active Monthly Users
Most Instagram users are between 18-29 years old, about six-in-ten online adults. *PewResearch
Image sharing today vs. 15 years ago
?’s for attendees – What is the most Instagrammed food: Pizza, then steak and sushi.
Most popular filter: Mayfair
What is our Strategy: Create a social media volunteer team. You don’t have to do this alone.
Short video devotions. Weekly every Monday in Stories.
Collecting videos from students to post the next day is a fun highlight idea.
Get them to all take their phones out at the same moment and get a 10-second clip then put them together to capture the same moment from different perspectives.
Do you use any apps to make this happen?: Apps for IG Stories is CutStory and InShot. CutStory trims clips into 15 sec increments for Stories and can also just re-export an old clip to be used.
Twitter: 328M Active Monthly Users
81% of millennials check Twitter at least once per day. Pew Research
Right now, no penalty for inactive. Sunday only strategy.
Katy Perry 105M, Justin Bieber 102M, Barack Obama 95.6M
On Twitter, more people follow the profile YouTube than Twitter.
Tweets with images receive 18% more clicks than tweets without images.
What is our Strategy: Engage with influencers
Snapchat: 255M Active Monthly Users
Controversy. Bad intentions at the start of the app. How about we redeem it?
On any given day, Snapchat reaches 41% of 18 to 34-year-olds in the US. SnapChat
60% of daily active Snapchatters create Snaps every day. SC
Percent of Snapchat users that are under 25 years old: 71%
What is our Strategy: Create a filter ($5), (pepperfilter)
(Depending on time we can cover LinkedIn and/or Pinterest:)
LinkedIn: 106M Active Monthly Users
LinkedIn more than 450 million user profiles.
Professional social network.
Digital endorsements
What is our Strategy: Engage with other Youth Ministers, and update your bio
Pinterest: 175M Active Monthly Users
Visual content.
Boards pulling in content from all over the web.
Stage design, signage, Experience community nursery design
New parents. If they walk in and it looks old, what impression are you leaving?
What is our Strategy: Create a shared board for your next environment redesign.
What Tools do you recommend for beginners?:
Build a Team, Hootsuite (facebook penalty), Buffer,
Go Weekly, DYM, StuffYouCanUse.
How to painlessly take full advantage of this tremendous tool for you and the families in your church, what is your final challenge?
Change your thinking from an obligation to ministry. You can help the families in your church get closer to God and each other when they pull out their device. Let’s use this resource for God’s glory, to build God’s kingdom so that in the end we hear the words, well done good and faithful servant. Take advantage of this tool.
Thanks and Encouragement to stick around for the Genius Bar.
Why Are Youth People Drawn to Certain Churches
Kara Powell Interviewed by Corey Jones
All churches grow old…but strategic churches are growing young! In this Idea Lab, Kara Powell from the Fuller Youth Institute will help leaders listen to the needs of the next generation without making excuses or being intimidated by change.
“Multiple studies highlight that 40 to 50 percent of youth group seniors—like the young people in your church—drift from God and the faith community after they graduate from high school.”
6 Core Commitments of a Growing Young church:
1 Unlock keychain leadership. Instead of centralizing authority, empower others—especially young people.
Key-loaning leaders: Often taking keys off the keychain and letting others borrow them temporarily, they make sure the keys are returned quickly.
Keychain leaders: Very aware of the keys they hold, they’re constantly opening doors for some while training and entrusting others who are ready for their own set of keys.
A keychain leader is something that young people are drawn to.
Why are leaders resistant to becoming a true keychain leader?
How would you challenge me to move towards these changes?
2 Empathize with today’s young people. Instead of judging or criticizing, step into the shoes.
We don’t want to make excuses and we do want to changes. Where are we, as youth pastors, in general, guilty of failing at this? How are we shooting ourselves in the foot?
3 Take Jesus’ message seriously.
In our teaching, our words matter. We can draw students in or we can accidentally repel them. My biggest takeaway was (Students don’t want to be saved from something but saved for something). How we present Jesus matters. Do you have other examples of words that matter, when it comes to teaching students?
4 Fuel a warm community.
“When someone says the name of your church, what image comes to your mind? A building? A worship service?” In a growing young church, nearly 1 in 3 shares about its warmth. This chapter is rich in ways churches can fuel a warm community. Since the book has been out, how have you seen churches across America actually change and start warming up?
5 Prioritize young people
If there is a group of people who prioritize young people and understand their value its these folks here. But, generally, we are not in charge. We don’t set the budget. So how can we be an advocate for the young people in our church without being the final authority?
6 Be the best neighbors.
This generation has many complexities in their culture, but what is something we could teach this week to our students on how to be the best neighbors?
Thank you. Appreciation for the years of research. Repetitive conversations around the same topic. Truly making a difference.
Leave us with this. What hope is there for the church? Is the future still bright?
Using Social Media To Grow, Inform, and Disciple Students
Corey Jones Interviewed by Paul Turner
You can help the families in your church get closer to God and each other when they pull out their device. Let’s use social media for God’s glory, to build God’s Kingdom so that in the end we hear the words, well done good and faithful servant.
Introductions and overview
Engaging Content / Stop the Scroll
Where do you start?
Build a Team
Street Team – a group of people who ‘hit the streets’ promoting an event or a product.
Share with your sphere of influence. Expand organic reach.
Sharing someone’s post is an endorsement. Thank these students. See if they will view this as their ministry. Make it easy for them.
Videos average 27x more shares than images. (Church Communications)
What if you have already done this? How could you go further?
Street Team 2.0
Give access or passwords
Let them follow their friends, like their friends’ posts, make a story, and make a post.
Now you have your team, how can you begin to reach students the other 167 hours in a week?
Minister to the youth where they are currently at.
Ask Engaging Questions:
What is your biggest takeaway from this weekend?
Anything I can pray about?
What is God doing in your life?
How are they living out the message? Share a video #YouthGroup Name or #CoreValue like #JesusFamily
Sermon quotes and sermon clips.
Does the clip make sense without further context?
Subtitles are more important than sound. 85% social media is consumed on mobile.
On mobile 47% of a video’s value is delivered in the first three seconds and 74% is in the first ten seconds. Then people start to tune out.
What tips do you have for creating videos that actually engage students?
If the goal is to stop the scroll, you will want to cut out as many distractions as possible. This is what vertical sizing does.
Optimal video sizes / Vertical vs horizontal video
Facebook: Vertical: 2×3
Instagram: Vertical: 4×5
Youtube: Horizontal 16×9
Twitter: Square 1×1
Celebrating: Holidays, Special Events, Baptisms.
Post a quality picture with a short story.
Content that shares the Gospel or makes it easy for them to share the Gospel.
What Apps are helpful in making this happen.
Basics like: Hootsuite or Buffer for scheduling.
Grammarly so you sound smart.
WordSwag to create graphics
IFTTT Geolocation and hashtag management.
The Houseparty App – Small group video meet up
WhatsApp Group Chats
InShot: Video Edits and great for getting pictures and videos into different sized formats.
CutStory: Cut video into story length (Instagram 15 seconds, seamlessly. And older videos are given a new date so 24-hour barrier is removed from Instagram stories.)
Snapseed: Photo editing.
Video to Gif.
So we are talking about “Using Social Media To Grow, Inform, and Disciple Students” what else do you see out there that is working?
Testimony Videos / Baptism Videos / Life Change Videos
Promotions that don’t feel promotional.
Church recruiting workers. Instead of making a graphic and paying to promote, why not go show appreciation to current workers. Go live or take some pictures to share. Content will do much better, the volunteer will know they are appreciated, and you will generate the excitement around your ministry that grows volunteer teams.
Social posts that are just social. NOT promotional or announcements.
Where would you point someone who wants more?
Stick around for the Genius Bar.
DYM Pictures and Videos – InstaFaith, Scripturegrams, InstaPrayer Challenge
DigitalDevotionals.com by Stuff you can use: monthly subscription – 30 done-for-you images and 30 pre-written devotionals for you to post and share with your followers to help them engage with God’s Word all week long. $10/mo
Social Networks:
At this conference, follow #NYWC17 people.
Facebook Group: Youth Specialties: Advancing Youth Ministry
Facebook Group: Visual Church Media
Facebook Group: Church Social Media Managers
Facebook Group: Church Communications
Thanks and Encouragement to stick around for the Genius Bar.
