By Daniel Im: Q&A Webinars are a monthly segment designed for Plus Members to hear from leading experts in church planting, multisite, and multiplication. For this month’s segment, Ed and I talk with Chris Martin. Chris is the Content Strategist Team Leader at LifeWay Christian Resources.
Social Media and the Church
It’s no surprise that social media is a prominent part of communication today. Many churches have realized the need for social media presence. However, with the rise of social media and technology, there are many questions that follow.
In the church, there needs to be some emphasis on social media. Social media is a good way to notify the community that you exist. A helpful rule of thumb is to assess what kind of marketing efforts you are promoting physically should also be advertised online. However, social media should not take precedence over serving the church in person or being face-to-face with someone. You should spend more time in person serving one other than the time you spend online.
Leveraging Social Media
One way to move planting models from being attractional to incarnational is to adjust your expectations for social media. You can’t expect the medium of social media to do more than it was designed to do. We have to be careful of what we expect certain mediums to bare. Social media can be used to disseminate gospel messages, engage people, and notify the community that churches exist. Be hesitant to use social media for anything like counseling or replacing sermons online. Anything more than that should be reserved for meeting with people in the church.
Social media is perfect for getting to know an area before planting a church somewhere. The North American Mission Board provides planters with information of where they are going to plant churches. Social media has the advantage of accessing what local news is occurring within an area. One way to manage these area is by creating an account on TweetDeck, which is owned by Twitter. Through this account, you can create a list of community accounts, location, and keep up with what’s going on in the city before you get there. Creating lists is a great way to segment people or locations that you want to follow without clogging up your main feed. This management system makes it easy to keep track of specific areas.
The Fine Line for Authors
There is a fine line between self-promoting a book and advertising on social media. Many people struggle with knowing where to draw that line. People tend to stay on two opposite ends of the spectrum. There are people who solely use their platforms to advertise or promote themselves, and there are people who do not use social media hardly at all in fear of being like the former. People need to find a happy medium of engaging and serving people without overwhelming them with advertising.
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Tweetables:
- “Social media is perfect for getting to know an area before planting a church somewhere.”-
- “It’s critical to have accountability in this so that you stay true to what you are supposed to write about.”-
- “Create content that serves the audience of your book and your church.”-
- “Let the needs of your church drive what you do, not your own ambitions.”-
- “People should focus on generating content that can be shared directly on Facebook’s platform. This is more beneficial for views than redirecting a video to YouTube.”-
- “A helpful rule of thumb is to assess what kind of marketing efforts you are promoting physically should also be advertised online.”-