The 1-Page Social Media Plan with Brady Shearer
Revisiting our Creative Ways keynote session from 2024 - in it, Brady Shearer breaks down how social media has shifted and why that change opens new doors for ministry. He offers practical guidance on turning sermons into content, building consistent rhythms, and focusing less on metrics and more on people.
About Brady Shearer
Brady Shearer, Creator of Pro Church Tools. Helping churches navigate the biggest communication shift in 500 years.
Show Notes
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Transcript
[John Borthwick]
Welcome to the Ministry Forum Podcast where we believe that you are not alone in your ministry journey. I'm the Reverend John Borthwick, your host coming to you from the Centre for Lifelong Learning at Knox College. Here we connect, encourage and resource ministry leaders all across Canada, in the joys, the struggles and everything in between. I love that I get to do this work, and most of all that, I get to share it with each and every one of you. So, thanks for giving us a listen today. Whether you're a seasoned leader or just starting out, this podcast is made with you in mind.
Welcome to the Ministry Forum Podcast. Today on the podcast, we are heading back into the vaults to share the keynote presentation from our first ever Creative Ways Conference that was way back in June of 2024. Brady Shearer was our first ever keynote speaker at our first ever Ministry Forum Conference Creative Ways, that was held at Laurier University, the day before General Assembly commenced. Based in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Brady Shearer is the founder of Pro Church Tools and Nucleus, a church website platform now used by over 3000 churches worldwide. Brady has spent more than a decade helping churches navigate what he calls the biggest communication shift in 500 years.
In this talk, Brady lays out what he calls the “One-Page Church Social Media Plan,” and it's both, more practical and more convicting than the title might suggest. He starts by naming a shift many of us have felt, but may have not fully understood. The move from what he calls the social graph era where your content reached people you already knew, to the discovery era, where algorithms now surface content based on interest, not connection. And that shift, he argues, is enormous for churches. From there, Brady walks through what he calls the church advantage, the insight that churches already have people who are creating and sharing a message every single week, which means the hardest part of content creation, the ideation of it, is already built into our rhythms in the church.
He offers a day-by-day social media calendar that turns one sermon into a full week of content across platforms, from Monday quotes to Saturday blog posts. But what stayed with me most was what Brady calls the church social media creed. It's a grounding word for any ministry leader who has ever posted a sermon on YouTube and watched that view count stall at 34 or 10 or even three, and felt like an absolute failure. Brady's message is clear, your job isn't to chase 10,000 views, it's to use digital media to care for the real people your church is connected. To meet them where they are, with hope, purpose, community and most of all the good news. Here's Brady Shearer at Creative Ways 2024.
[Brady Shearer]
Simply put, we help churches navigate the biggest communication shift in 500 years. Specifically for social media, we work with about 165 churches every single week creating content for them, and so everything you're about to learn here is exactly what I teach my employees. It's exactly what we do for churches. It's biblically based, and it's going to be incredibly dense. I really want to make sure that the time that you've given me is valuable to you. I've provided the entire agenda that we have to John. You'll have it available to you, so you don't feel like you need to, though, you're certainly welcome to take photos of the slides. Take notes.
It breaks up into three sections. We're going to talk about the state of social media, which informs why we do what we do. We're going to talk about specific exercises that I teach my team to basically take this goldmine of information that we have, the wisdom of Scripture, via the sermons that our senior leaders are putting so much effort into every single week to create, and how we bring that to the digital world to amplify this message to those that need to hear it most. And then we'll talk about evaluation. You know, the biggest question I've got in 15 years of helping churches with social is, “Hey, cool post, bro, but like we're in-person ministry, how does this help our actual church?” We're going to answer that question. We have frameworks. We have church social media policy that I'm going to give you, what I call the church social media creed, and we're going to get all into that right now.
So, the state of social media, it's history. It's really easy to break it up into two distinct eras. The first era of social media, we call the social graph era. This is basically everything from Zuckerberg turning Facebook registration on, or if you want to go back to MySpace, MSN, how far you back you want to go to 2018, and this era of social is marked by a really easy thing to remember. You would open your feed, whatever platform you were on, and you would recognize the people that you saw. They were your friends and your family. We call that the social graph. These were the people that you chose to follow, and at one point it was chronological. Then it became more interest-based. The algorithms figured, “Hey, we're going to try to give you this in the order that you want,” but it was everyone that you chose to follow. Pretty straightforward.
In 2018 this brand-new upstart platform comes along. It's called Tiktok, and they introduce a brand-new way of doing social media. It really catches on with Gen Z, and it's so disruptive that every other platform starts to copy it. And this ushers in this new era of social that we call the discovery era. Now the content that we see on our feeds is not really influenced by our friend and family connections. It's primarily motivated by our viewing habits, our personal interests, and really importantly for us as churches, our local, geographic location now plays a massive role in distribution, and that's why I like to say as much as it's reasonable for all of us to perhaps, miss the good old days of social when you could open up your feed and you'd actually see your friends and family in the order you'd expect it. For creators, and that includes churches in this sense, there's never been a better time to be doing social ministry.
Because if you open your feed and you think, what, maybe 50% of the people you recognize, 50% are, I don't know who made this recipe for Orzo, but I'm glad it's on my feed, because I really need it right now. Just me. Okay, understood. There's 50% of real estate on your feed that's up for grabs. That means every single phone around you in this room right now, in the cities and villages and areas that we minister in as churches, every single phone has that same 50% real estate. That real estate for anyone can show up.
I'll never forget I was celebrating my dad's 60th birthday. We went into the city to this Brazilian steakhouse, and, green means more meat, red means stop meat. Yeah, and the meat boys are coming, and one of the guys comes up, and I'm, “Oh my gosh, that's a fitness creator that I follow on Tiktok.” I had no idea that he was local to where I lived, but that's kind of how it goes nowadays. That real estate is up for grabs. We can get our content on there, which is great news.
I like to mention at this point and, always acknowledge that we as churches do not have the same resources compared to other businesses or other organizations. We're all very much aware of that what we're often not aware of or we overlook is what I like to call the church advantage, and that is simply that we are, as far as I can tell, the only industry organization in the world that has senior leaders in a weekly rhythm of creating what we would call in the secular world “content.” Senior leaders putting in a ton of creative and spiritual effort to take the wisdom of Scripture and prepare it in a way that you can deliver in a 10, 20, 30, 40 minute message. Obviously, more church models, as we're going to learn today are being expressed, which I'm all a fan for. But I think what most of us are familiar with is a single person. Biggest chunk of the pie on a Sunday morning or a weekend service being that sermon that is a gold mine of information that we can repurpose for social media. We're going to get into precise exercises on how to do it. We're not going to just talk abstractly. We're going to get really itty-gritty. This is amazing.
I like to think about real estate agents, lawyers, dentists. What do they do all week? They're signing contracts, they're cleaning teeth, selling homes. Then they also have to contend with the digital world and with social media. We are the only industry where the senior leader, is putting in all this work. We can repurpose it for social. We're going to get into how to do it. It's an amazing advantage. And then finally, I like to compare and contrast social media now to traditional media. I talked about my early days as a media director. 2010, back then, this church plant we had, we were very fortunate to have some wealthy individuals on the board, and we had some budget to explore traditional media. We did in that first year, billboards. We did TV and radio spots. We did printed mailers. And the problem with those types of things is that when we would gather up as the leadership team, we would talk about how, if these things don't work, big chunk of the budget is blown. Hey, maybe, maybe next year we can try again.
What's amazing about social right now is that distribution is free. This is something that would have been unimaginable in the previous era of social. You would have had to spend roughly $10,000 per month on Facebook ads to get the kind of distribution that is now freely available if we make good stuff. But there's one more element to that. We're going to talk about how many posts, percentage wise, we would hope reach audiences beyond our existing following. The reality is not every single post you publish is going to reach a ton of people. We all know this to be true. But what is true about social that was not true and is not true about traditional media, is that if I go to my next-door neighbor and I take a printed mailer and I leave it on their doorstep, inviting them to church. Sunday, Christmas, VBS, whatever it might be, and they don't get connected to church, our congregation does not benefit in any way from that.
On social, sure you might publish a piece of content. Let's say we take a sermon, we repurpose it into a quote post, into a vertical video, into a carousel post, whatever it might be, we're going to get into specifics. It might not reach 1000s of new people, but your existing congregation still hears the wisdom of Scripture. They're interacting with the goodness of God throughout the week, saints are scattered. We're not together on the weekend. It's always a great reminder of how, “Hey, Sunday is coming. I'm part of a greater family irrespective of what's going on in my life right now,” and that means that no effort on social is ever wasted, which, again, is incredibly encouraging.
Okay, this is the one-page church social media calendar. This is when we work with churches, what we produce and provide for them. We're not going to get into every single thing, nitty gritty, right here, right now. The most important thing, and we'll get to this a bit later, for social media, if I could distill it down to the simplest, is committing to a consistent social media publishing schedule. What's important to emphasize is that you as a church, and this is the same for my company as well. We are not influencers, obviously, and that's why taking advice from social media creators outside of the church world can be problematic. In the sense that, if you are an influencer, the way that you earn money is by going to brands and saying, “Hey, this is how many views and impressions that I can get you.” And it's often a quantity game. The more posts that you can get out, the more views and impressions that you can secure. So, when you go to a brand deal, you can make bigger promises to them, which is going to yield bigger contracts for you.
This makes no sense for us, the churches, obviously. This is also great news, because you don't need to take, you know, Dwayne, The Rock, Johnson's approach of no days off. It's perfectly okay. We like to call it no weeks off. This is the most important non-negotiable of social media. Everything else, we can adjust, and we can negotiate, and we can test, and we can make consolations for whatever our church's specific rhythms and availability for producing content is, but that no weeks off approach is important. At the very least, two posts per week on the platforms that your church cares about. If you can stick to that, you have already done more than what 99% of churches will do. When churches come to me and they [say], “We will give you money to do social for us.” It's not often because they don't know what to do. It's because they're, “Look, we all wear multiple hats in ministry, and I'd love to dedicate attention to this. I care about it, but the reality is, is that I have other responsibilities,” and what happens with churches on social is, you might come to a talk like this, you might watch one of my videos online.
You might see what another church is doing. You get inspired to do something similar, and you stick to it for a week or two. But then what happens? Again, multiple hats. You get pulled onto another project. Your attention and time is needed elsewhere. Social media dips. This is the biggest problem, the inability to sustain this rhythm of consistently publishing the only non-negotiable, at least twice per week. What's the upside? How far can we go? Really, you can go as much as you want. So long as quality maintains, there's really no upper limit to posting now. In the previous era of social, when you knew everyone, we probably all had that experience when you log on, it's like every other post was that one person or that one brand. They overdid it. That's not how social works now.
It's a lot more intelligent. These algorithms. If you create something great, the right audience is going to find it. Again, this will all be in the PDF that you have available to you, and we have a question period at the end. Everything that I don't hit on, everything that you're like, I still have no idea what you're talking about, sir, we'll get to. All right, let's get to some exercises. So, you've got this sermon. Senior leader put a lot of work into it. How do we take that and bring it to the world of the internet? The pandemic did one nice thing, which is it created the infrastructure in a lot of our churches that didn't exist previously, which is, we have a video recording of this sermon. Sometimes churches feel like my video recording is not very good quality. It is not good enough to put online. And I just want to encourage you here with a couple of very practical things.
Number one, virtually every single social media post online is recorded with a phone these days. So much so, you know those CRC kids out there at that youth conference, they're all sickos. Let me tell you why. They don't even like good quality anymore. There's this new stock photo site that has just been driving me crazy. Now, this is a bit of a diatribe. You're going to have to just humour me for a moment. Okay, when I was young, there was a stock photo site called Unsplash, and what was really cool about Unsplash is you could download any stock photo for free, and it was different than previous stock photo sites because the images were cinematic. They had shallow depth of field, like there was a blur, and they had texture, and the colors were rich.
You know, those plastic looking stock images of super smiley corporate people that obviously aren't real. Unsplash was the answer to that, and it was, like, done with really nice camera. It was, “Wow, this looks real. This is quality.” Gen Z comes around, those lunatics, and they're, Unsplash is cringe. You understand that, this is cringe. What's actually authentic is a photo taken with my phone. And there are now stock photo websites. You can go to one: dupephotos.com. That's another word they love. Dupe. Dupephotos.com and instead of a picture of coffee with some shallow depth of field and some nice grain and some texture and curation, someone that put a little bit of effort into it. It's just a photo of a coffee cup on a table. This is just one important thing that's always worth understanding about creativity, especially in our churches, because they are multi-generational, at least at their best, is that what one generation perceives as authentic, another generation perceives as staged.
And I can quantitatively prove to you that my version of stock photos are objectively better, but that doesn't matter. And to get back to my original point of my content, my film version isn't good enough. One, apparently, that's good now, so, lean into it. Secondly, this is really practical. When we review, let's say, the videos of our sermons and our church services we're often looking on our computer. What's nice is that when content gets delivered on a phone, this is small, and so if you take your 720, let's say, compressed already, because it was encoded for the live stream, and you download it straight from YouTube, or whatever it might be. You shrink it down, those pixels that are a little bit more stretched on a bigger screen aren't so stretched on a smaller screen. And so that's actually just a really practical thing that it shrinks down. That's good.
Final thing I'll hit on this is, again, as churches, we have an amazing advantage with sermon content. Let's imagine there's a recording of this, which there may or may not be, it seems but bless. When you come across a video, let's say we repurpose of this talk, it will become instantly understood by the audience that this was a live thing that actually happened with real people in the room. There is the really weird trend of social right now. Surely you've seen these types of these types of videos. They're like the man or woman on the street interview videos, right? What if I told you that the majority of those that you see are staged? They are not real, and the reason they're staged is because, unless you know they're staged, you're going to think they're real. We're so used to having this filter that's a subconscious filter for most of us. We've seen so many things that we've built up this filter of, “I don't trust you. This is you selling me something. This is ulterior motive, whatever it might be.”
So, what creators and marketers, terrible people like myself, have done is we have begun to--to be clear, I don't do this--but what these creators have done is they're creating these staged environments and these skits that are meant to appear as real. What do you have going for your church as a sermon clip that actually happened. It actually bypasses the filter that a lot of people have, and this lack of quality that you're worried about, “Oh, it's not polished enough, it's not going to look good enough.” That's a feature. It's not a bug, and so you don't need to worry about it. Now, there is one thing we need to worry about, and that is the hook. This is the 3C’s exercise. The most important thing for stopping the scroll on social, which at the end of the day is your ultimate goal, attention. The most valuable commodity your church can possess online and in-person.
Anything that you want to share with them first comes via attention. The way that we do that on social is with the hook. Let's imagine we have a 20-, 30-, 40-minute sermon that we want to repurpose for social media. Well, Instagram reels has a 90 second limit, even if it expands that limit, we're talking usually about a 30 to 60/90 second video. We're going to drop someone in the middle of a sermon that they will have not seen the other 20, 30, or 40 minutes from. They will not have that context. So, what we do with this hook is we contextualize that moment for a viewer to immediately put them in the right position. So, one hook example here, and in this PDF, there are examples you can click. I'm not going to click the View Video button and test the technology Gods today with that, but if you click that, when you have it, you'll be taken to a page where you can watch examples of this.
So, the hook for this pastor’s sermon. The number one job of a parent. What we do is we drop you right in a moment of the sermon that you would have needed a couple minutes of context to understand where you are, and now in the first three seconds, which is roughly how long we'll keep the hook on the screen for you, are now put in a place where there is expectation. You know what's about to come. We basically make a promise to you. This is what this content is going to answer. This is what it's going to deliver. Are you willing to give us your time for the next 30 to 60 to 90 seconds? The key to writing a good hook comes down to the three C's. You've seen them already. There's cliffhanger, there's common, and there's care. We're going to get into bad examples. We're going to get into good examples. This is the exact exercise I teach my employees for when they take that clip of the sermon that they find enjoyable, but they just watched through the whole sermon, so they have the context that the social media audience won't. How do we contextualize it?
Three C's. What we do is we rank each of the 3C’s out of a score of five, and the idea is, when you add up those three scores, if it doesn't equal more than 10 out of a total possible 15, the hook is probably not good enough to reach a broad audience. Now, the first non-negotiable that is not one of the 3C’s is that we write our hooks at the intersection of faith and culture. We need the piece of content to be accessible to someone that knows Jesus. We need to be just as accessible to someone that has no faith background whatsoever.
The number one job of a parent. Well, everyone is either a parent or the child of a parent. It doesn't matter what faith that you profess, if any, that is something that is going to be relevant to you, but the wisdom is still from Scripture. So if we're talking about categories that are going to be universally accessible. I always like to say, “Wisdom of Scripture is for all people, for all time.” Now, some of it is admittedly a bit obscure, so we would avoid that if we're talking about social media content which we want to reach as broad an audience as possible.
Categories that make sense for this purpose, hope, community, finances, parenting, relationships, existential dread. That's a good one. Topical right now for our society. The 3C’s: cliffhanger. This one's pretty obvious. We don't want to give away the punchline or the big takeaway from the video. This is something that we found with working with our team in churches is sometimes a bit of a challenge. They want to say exactly what is about to come in the video, but then there's really no reason to stick around. Second thing, common. Is this headline universally accessible? Just mention the intersection of faith and culture. That's that. Then number three, care. This is the one that's hardest to understand. Do you, going throughout your everyday life, care about this in this moment? I'll get into this in the bad example, the one I always like to use for care is gratitude.
No one can make an argument that practicing gratitude is something that's not useful for every person, irrespective of faith. Good thing, noble thing. We should do more of it. I should do more of it. If you meet me in the place at the very beginning of the video with that hook, and you're trying to get me to care about gratitude in that moment. I'm not confident [that] I, or many others will care, because it's not common for you to wake up at start of your day and be like, “Man, I got to practice more gratitude today.” What are the things that are running through our mind? “Man, finances are tight, except it's the first of the month and we're all rich today. Am I right? Thank you. Lord.” No, just me, okay, on the first, oh well.
Finances, parenting, my kids are crazy, man, they just won't listen. I have two daughters. Girl dad, love it. Best thing ever. One’s 9. One’s 2. The nine-year-old, she's in this phase [where] she just wants to lie all the time. She just lies all the time. I say, “Yes, you can have two gummy candies.” I'm already pushing the limits on the candy. I look around, she's got two gummies in her hand, and she's, “Thanks Dad.” I say, “Open your mouth.” I had to take away all the gummies. Can't have the lie. My wife and I, we never lie. Her? I don't know. Something about parenting. I'm thinking about, “Is this all there is to life? Right? Is this is all there is right now? Purpose, community, loneliness?
Oh! I'm thinking about the Italian prairies. Who doesn't want to be there right now. I dwelled too long on the screen. Thank you, everyone. The meeting place, simply put, is different than the ending place. Where you meet people has to be where they care. You can lead them to gratitude. You can lead them to these things that are maybe a little bit more, less desirable from the outset, but that's not where you want to meet people. If you don't have their attention, you can never lead them to where you want them to be.
The 3C’s exercise. Okay, specific examples. Why it is so hard to say, “I'm sorry,” to our kids? This lacks a cliffhanger. I've given away the exciting part of this hook. In a good example version of that hook, I would rewrite it as the two words that every parent needs to say, or the two words that not enough parents say. A cliffhanger often comes down to specificity, because you can make the argument, “Why is it so hard to say, I'm sorry to our kids?” Well, the cliffhanger is “Why?” Right? You're going to answer the “why.” That's just not exciting. That's not something that's going to make me stick around. Often, a cliffhanger is something that's highly specific.
I had a post that did really well for me the other day on Instagram. It was a simple carousel and the cover, or the hook, was “Three words you should never say in church.” The three words were, “don't miss it.” You say an announcement at the end, “don't miss it.” Oh my gosh, relax. I suggested an alternative like, “Hope to see you there!” “Don't miss it!” has this undertone of guilt, [which is] not a motivator I would prefer to use in church. “Hope to see you there!” has this undertone of community and optimism. The cover doesn't give away that. It doesn't say, “Don't say, ‘See you there.’” It says, “Three words you should never say in church.” Okay, I'm interested.
Another bad example, “The secret to a worshipful heart.” This would be a bad example in the common category. Maybe it's the Pentecostal in me, “a worshipful heart,” that's language we might use. I mean outside of our denomination, but definitely, outside of the Christian world, “worshipful heart” doesn't mean anything to anybody. So that's not a great place to start, because you're not going to have the chance to reach a broad audience.
Final bad example, “How you can show gratitude even when you don't know how.” Now, I like “even when you don't know how.” Feel free to take that. That's a good one, but again, gratitude, as we discussed, [it’s] not too exciting as a place to meet people at. Let's talk about some good examples, “Two words that parents struggle to say (but need to say anyway).” I love brackets at the end of a hook as a nice addendum. I don't know why. Just some fun formatting. “Want stronger relationships? See this for the people you care about.” Specific, and it feels like something that you could learn in a 30 to 90 second clip.“Do you have a dysfunctional family? Here's some good news.” Love this style of hook. This is kind of paradoxical, right? You invert expectations. Are you a dysfunctional family? I am. Let me tell you why it's a great thing. Kind of did that earlier, when I was, “Oh, you feel bad. Your sermon videos maybe aren't good enough.” Feature, not a bug. Invert.
“The meaning of life according to the Bible.”
“A guide for healthy masculinity.”
“What your bank statement says about you.”
Talked about the categories, right? Finances. Purpose. Gender. That's something that's obviously hot topic right now. Wisdom of Scripture speaks to it.
Let's get to church social media policy. When we talk about church social media policy, it is often some of the most highly watched, most downloaded stuff that we do. I think a big reason for that is because social is new. It's been around since what? 2008? That would make it 16 years old. I don't know if you remember yourself as a 16-year-old. You did a lot of good? Probably were a little bit destructive as well. That's kind of the phase we're in with social media. We're learning a lot about social right now, and it's destructiveness that it can have. We've got enough generations that have gone through it, and we've been able to look, okay, maybe giving children phones at eight years old was a bad idea. Perhaps we shouldn't have needed a study to do that, but perhaps we did.
Social media policy. What it does is it creates shared language to talk through problems that happen in church. And this is not just true for social you know, it's true for anything in church, but what happens? You get a bunch of people in a room trying to solve a problem. We all care about the problem that we want to solve, but we might have different preferred ways of solving it. What can happen is, maybe our personal preferences, not ours. Ours are the right ones. Someone else's personal preferences are clearly rising above what we would say is the church's mission. Policy. Mission. Vision. Having this shared language becomes very important as these anchors to discussing how we're going to solve problems.
My wife and I were having a conversation kind of like this the other day. She was talking about, “Hey, I'd really like if you could spend more quality time with me.” Unfortunately, if we believe the love languages are a real thing, it seems we're a bit mismatched. I'm incredibly good at the acts of service. I've gotten into bread baking. You wake up on a Saturday, fresh bread fills the home. I did that. But she's, “Yeah, but the time.” I was like, “You know what? Bread takes a lot of time.” I got to move the time with the bread over to my wife. I said to her, “You know, I don't know if we've ever actually talked really specifically about, what does quality time mean? How are we defining that?” Because we think we would know what that means, but we hadn't actually quantified it. So, we've probably, for the 12 years we've been married, 15 years that we've been together, the love of my life, not meeting each other exactly at the same place, because we're using different definitions. We didn't have that shared language. So we've created some of that, and we're going to continue to improve upon it.
That's what social media policy is meant to do. You are more than welcome to steal this. Install it in your church. The next time conflict comes up:
Should we be on this platform?
Should we be posting this much?
Should we invest X, Y or Z resources into this department?
You can use social media policy to hopefully navigate those challenges.
Rule number one: We want to use social to do ministry, not just promote ministry.
First 10 years of my career was basically dedicated to this one thing, because churches would essentially use social media, like a billboard or like a bulletin board, perhaps more aptly.
It would be:
Come to this thing that we're doing in person.
This is the event we have going on.
Information.
Information.
Information.
No inspiration whatsoever.
That's not what people use social media for. So, when churches would ask, “We're not really seeing performance.” I'm, I mean, “Yeah. Why would someone want to follow this type of account?” If we pivot to use social media to do ministry, to inspire spiritual practice, to teach the wisdom of Scripture, to motivate people to take next steps and engage, now we have done something that social media wants us to do. We're going to see better results.
Rule number 2: The one in 5 rule.
This is an easy way of actually seeing this through. We looked at the churches that were excelling the most on social. We took inventory of everything they published, and what we discovered was that no more than one in five of the posts they published were promotional in nature. And when I say promotional in nature, I basically mean anything that would be heavily information focused related to an in-person event.
“I need a new sermon series this weekend,” or whatever it might be in that vein.
“This event coming up.”
“Hey, register for VBS.”
“We've got picnic in the park.”
“Baptisms in the lake,” which are cool and have a place.
But frequency is what matters. What we found is the sweet spot is roughly one in 5. One in 10 is great. If we're being honest, never being promotional would be the best, but there has to be the sweet spot between what's realistic and practical and what is effective. One in 5 is a great spot, if at least four to five or 80% of the content you publish is valuable on its own. For example, a sermon clip of 30-, 60-, 90- seconds of teaching the wisdom of Scripture. The number one job of a parent. You watch that. You feel edified by it. That's valuable information. That's great, so long as roughly four to five of your posts fall into that category, you can squeeze in a promotion every fifth post, and you won't derail your momentum. Because as social platforms have become more transparent about how these algorithms work, what we know is true. The head of Instagram has come out and said this is that there are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of what they call positive signals, and they're going to distribute your content based on those positive and/or negative signals, and the mixture of both. If you continually publish promotional content that is just not valuable to that many people, your posts are not going to have that many positive many positive signals. So, when the algorithm starts deciding, “Okay, we got 50% of real estate on every single phone, it's not likely to elevate your church or your pastor's content, because over and over again, people are basically voting with their time and saying, “Yeah, not interested.”
This one in 5 rule is the sweet spot where you can thread in some promotion but not derail the momentum.
Rule number 3: Repeat the best. Forget the rest. Continue to test
Who doesn't love a good rhyme. This is an easy mantra to remember when you publish a piece of content and it goes well, go back to that spot. Fun little secret about social media, a lot of creators, myself included, we will publish the exact same content multiple times. That post that I mentioned, the one that did really well for us recently, “Three words that your church should never say,” I've published that 6 times. What I'll do is, every six months, I'll look back at the stuff that I've done, and rank it by performance, and if it's like a top 10 performer, I just publish it again, and guess what? Nobody notices. And if they notice, they don't care, because it's still awesome and they like it. Now I don't have to come up with new content all the time, because I can just republish it again. This doesn't just work for exact post words, word for word. It also works for post frameworks.
Carousel post. If you find, oh, there's a specific quote post that we did that went really well, repeat the best. Repeat it, repeat it, repeat it. Once it starts performing not as well, then you can forget it, and that's the second stanza.
Then that final stanza is: Continue to test. So much of the great content that we've developed for churches, that I've done for myself, you perhaps have experienced this yourself. There was a time when you didn't publish that type of content. There was a time when you had never done anything like that, and then you do it and people really resonate with it. You're, “Oh, this is true.” Not just in the digital world, but in any area of ministry. “Oh, we had never done a VBS. We had never done this type of thing before. We did it. The church, the community, really resonated with it.” I always like to leave maybe 10% of my social media, kind of, calendar for just trying something brand new, and more often than not, it doesn't do so well. But, maybe one out of 10 times you find something that's, “Wow, that is really special.” If I had not continued testing, I never would have discovered it.
Repeat the best. Forget the rest. Continue to test.
Final three rules in our social media policy: Our efforts on social must be informed by Christ.
You're here, so I don't know if this is absolutely necessary, but as someone that dedicates their entire professional life to the online world. Sometimes it can be misinterpreted, especially from pandemic times, that I think online church is just as good as in-person church, which I don't and have never believed at all. I think online and in-person do distinctly different things. What in-person does online cannot do what online does, in-person cannot. When they work together, that's called harmony, and we can get something really special.
If you ask me, and people often do, “Brady, what is the biblical basis for tattoos?” No, sorry, they do ask me that, but they also ask me, “What's the biblical basis for social media?” I always point to the Great Commission, right. Go out into all the world. Share the good news. What social affords us is this amazing ability. It's like a billboard that we can put our message on, but everyone is holding that billboard and looking at it all day long on their phone. That is something that's amazing. It's destructive if people are consuming stuff that's not so good, but it can be redemptive if people are encountering the mission and message of Jesus.
In terms of how we do things, that intersection of faith and culture, that's pulled directly from Jesus. There's this book by Robert Stein. It's called, “The Method and Message of Jesus's Teachings,” and in that book, he takes inventory of all of the ways that Christ teaches in the Synoptic Gospels. Takes inventory of all of it, and he discovered that more than a third of all of Jesus' teachings were in parables. So, you've got this new big idea that you share them with the world, the kingdom of God. It's abstract. It's bizarre. It's new. To get people to that spot. He talks about sheep, and coins, and lost sons, and all of these accessible, farming, wine. Lot of wine. Lot of wine talk to get to the kingdom. And I think that's okay here, in the Pentecostal. We didn't really like the wine.
It's a fun story. Just as a bit of a reprieve from the dense social media talk. When I was in Bible College, one of my professors, who will go unnamed, of course, to not incriminate him. I'm at his house, and he was a great professor. I loved him, and he opens a cabinet, and I'm like, “Professor, you have wine up there. We're not allowed to drink in the Pentecostal church as pastors.” And he's like, “I don't know if this is the best time to tell you, but you shouldn't look in a lot of your professor's cabinet.” It's like, “Professor, this is disillusioning.” Oh, man, so the intersection of faith and culture. Abstract idea. Kingdom of God. How do we make that more accessible for people? That is pulled from the style of teaching that Jesus oftenly used, parables.
Rule number 5: Stop the scroll.
This is a practical one. We talked about it already. The number one job that you have on social. I really want to emphasize here, in the previous era of social, stopping the scroll often meant using really cool, fancy designs that looked different, that kind of caught people off guard. That worked, kind of like 2018 and before, because you saw every single person on your feed, and you knew who they were. So, it wasn't weird when you saw them, because you chose to follow them, and you expected to see them. So, we, as creators, had to do something different to get you to stop scrolling. That does not work at all anymore. In fact, just seeing someone you recognize on social now makes you stop scrolling, because so much of what you see is unfamiliar. So, if you're trying to stop the scroll for new people, and for people that already follow you, there's two things that you can do.
One, be familiar to them, for people that follow you
This is why sermon clips are so useful, because you're just going, “I don't know who that is. I don't know who that is.” Or there’s a recipe, maybe you care, maybe you don't. I don't know who that is. “Oh, my pastor, I recognize that face!” I'm more likely to stop. Humans connect with humans. We especially connect with people that we recognize.
So, how do we stop the scroll for people that don't follow us?
That's where the hook comes in. Someone that doesn't follow your church. You see a sermon clip. They don't know who your pastor is, they don't know who that communicator is. They're not going to stop but if the hook is relevant to them, you know the number one job of a parent, if that matters to them, now they're likely to stop the scroll. This is also meant to unburden yourself. I love that phrasing from John. This is meant to unburden yourself of the desire like, “I have to be an outstanding designer.” “We have to have the best gear.” “We have to have the best tech.” “Our sermon recordings have to be pristine.” No, none of it matters. It will not help with effectiveness whatsoever, unless your audience is entirely church creatives. It matters for me, because if my stuff looks sloppy, the church creatives that I'm trying to build trust with probably won't trust me, because it'll look sloppy.
Our churches are not us, and so they do not care about the same things that we care about. And then finally,
Rule number 6: In-person informs online. The principle of congruency.
This one, it's maybe a little bit more difficult to digest, but I have found it tremendously useful when talking with senior leaders, when they have struggles with social. My belief is that what you do in-person can inform what you do online.
One practical example: A pastor feels uncomfortable posting sermon clips online.
They, for noble reasons, don't want it to appear that they're making everything about themselves. What I would say to that pastor is, “How does your existing service programming in-person look?” And if we can mirror that online, that's congruency, and we're using the existing mission of the church, and we're reflecting that in the digital space. If we start treating digital differently than in person by default, we're actually not then making mission driven decisions. We're making preference driven decisions. That isn't to say that sometimes we treat digital differently than in-person, again, they are different, but if the default is like, “I would never post sermon clips of myself online.” Man, 40 minutes of your 60 minute church service is you on stage with nobody else. So, if that's okay in-person, what makes it different online? And perhaps there's a good reason for it, but now we're getting to the heart of the matter and the mission. If congruency is the foundation, then we can get to more meaty discussions from there
Okay, I always like to put this up here, because everyone loves it. So, write these times down. 9:26 a.m., 10:26 a.m., 7:21 p.m. If you forget everything else that I said and all you would do is this, you go viral every time. False. You would not, but churches love to care about this and obsess about this. Hashtags are the same thing. Man, if I can just unlock the secret hashtag that would make me reach a bunch of new people. No, these things do not matter. But. But. If nothing else, that can be a good starting point. We do find it interesting that these times kind of hit right before or as work begins, and then right after work ends.
Now, if we were going to get really analytical about this, isn't it funny, 9:26 a.m. you're kind of easing into your work day, right? Like I'm at work, but let me drink my coffee first. I got here a bit late. And then 7:21 p.m. No one's scrolling at 4:30 because you're, “I'm leaving the office. I got to make dinner, and then dinner's put away.” Maybe the kids are put away. Okay, it's 7:21 now I can start getting on social again. So that's an interesting kind of rhythm.
It's the consistent publishing schedule that matters. The difference between 9:26 a.m. and 8:26 a.m., is not going to matter. For context on how I do this. You saw the social media calendar that we recommend for churches. The way that I do it is I publish four times per week. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, or Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Why? Because y'all are in the office Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Some of you have Friday off and some of you have Monday off. So, I'm posting when you're at work. If I'm posting on Saturday, you're like, “Brady, I do not care right now. It is summer. I am at the beach. Don't talk to me right now.” So that type of rhythm can inform what you do, but it's the consistency, the algorithms, those positive signals, they know from my account, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, or if it's a long weekend, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. That's when this guy's going to post. People tend to like it. And then you build that rhythm over and over again. It becomes consistent.
Okay, let's get to the church social media creed. I'm just going to read it out loud. This part's really quick. You might publish this weekend's sermon on YouTube and get 34 views. You might compare what you're doing against an influential church. You might wish you were more like them. Don't. Your job is not to get 10,000 views on each service or 1000 likes on each post. Your job is to use digital media to help care for Joshua, Marcy, Kayla and Cameron, and every beating heart your church is connected to. How can you impact their life and affect meaningful change for them? Social is tricky. It will prey on our weaknesses, make you feel like you're not good enough. Resist that. Don't let yourself be distracted. There are real people in your care that need hope, purpose, community and the good news. Meet them where they are, ignore the other stuff, because the other stuff is just there to make you miserable.
Social Media algorithms have one goal. That goal is to keep you on social media as long as they can. The longer you spend, the more ads they can serve you, the more money they make. It's a simple game. It's not hard to understand. The difficulty is that human nature is a little bit tricky, and the different emotions that keep us focused on things for the longest, tend to be the not-so-great ones. Outrage is a good one. Lust is a good one. Envy is a good one. So, what you do is you're scrolling and you're looking at things you shouldn't be or you're scrolling and you're getting mad at things even though, why are you getting mad at this thing? It's not related to you, or if it is, you can't control it. You're getting mad in the middle of your day, or it's 9:26, go to work, come on. You're looking at other people's lifestyles. You're looking at their clothes, and their homes, and their cars, and their spouses, and their lives, and you're like, “Man, why can't my life look like that?”
Social will, at its worst, descend to prey on our weaknesses. The more mindful we are of that, the more we can control what we're seeing on our algorithms. Also, we can control how we feel when we evaluate our own work. I was doing my first of the month tasks this morning, and I was looking at some of our metrics, and they weren't so good last month. Others were good. But guess what? I didn't focus on the good ones, did I? I focused on the bad ones. I had to remind myself of this. “Hey, do the work.” I hit publish. If I'm confident, I stayed true to who I am and what I believe God has called me to. The rest will figure itself out. And so, this social media creed, guess what? I post this on social every six months, and every six months, people are like, “Oh yeah, this is exactly what I needed to hear,” and it's what we all need to hear, because otherwise, we kind of get off course. We start focusing on the wrong things. This anchors us back to what matters
All right, let's get into the final segment, final section, then we can do some questions. So, this is the answer to the biggest question I've gotten in the 10 years I've helped churches with social.
How can we prove our online efforts make a difference in-person?
The reality is there is no exact way I can say, this many new followers online equals this many new baptisms or recurring givers or in-person attendees. In the same way, when a church books a call with me because they want to sign up for a product that we have, I don't know what post they saw that inspired that. A lot of times it's, “Man, I've been following you for a while, and I just figured I should reach out.” “Which post was it?” “I don't know. It was probably cumulative.”
We have this rule in marketing. It's called the Rule of Seven. It predates social media. You need seven interactions with the brand before you can make a decision. So which interaction was it? Was it the commercial that you saw of that new car? Or was it when you started looking for that car and suddenly it appeared out of everywhere when you started looking for it? Was it that your friend had…I don't know. It's just seven things add up roughly, and now you're ready to make a decision.
So, that also doesn't mean social media is meant to be a shot in the dark. This is the answer we talked about, the no-weeks-off rhythm. The idea with the social ministry mountain is that at the top we have crossover events. Crossover events are when we can clearly point to our in-person efforts, translating, pardon me, our online efforts, translating to in-person. To get there, we have to scale in sequence, the first three layers. Base layer, no weeks off. Non-negotiable. Like I said, very few churches are able to achieve this indefinitely. Why? Because they start focusing on things that don't matter. Hashtags. Post timing. At least two posts per week, that's taken care of. That is the indefinite rhythm that matters the most
The other thing about social is it's kind of like learning a movement, whether you're getting into running, or you want to do a deadlift, or you want to do a push up, or you want to bake some bread. Okay? It's the same thing. You know, I always use fitness analogies. Forget it. I'm using a bread analogy. Let me tell you about bread, okay? The water temperature interacts with the yeast amount interacts with the water amount. It's this whole big thing, and it's these tiny little differences that actually translate to better bread. It's the type of thing that I can read about in my bread books, but until I have, what they recommended a little notebook. I take the final dough temperature at the end of every mixing cycle, and I write it down, and I go, “Hmm. I follow the temperature as it said in the recipe, but the ambient temperature in this room and its humidity is different, and it's different now in May than it will be in December.” I feel like I'm losing you on the bread. It's the type of thing that you could only learn about when you actually do it. The same is true for social. The no-weeks-off rhythm is important for those positive signals and the algorithm that we've discussed. It's just as important for you, because social, you only learn by doing it. You have to hit publish
My friend Sean, he always says, “Your first videos are the worst videos.” How you get around that? You don't! You have to go through the worst videos to get to anything that's great. You can go watch my first videos. I've been on YouTube for 10 years. The first ones, I'm on this collapsible green screen in my 14th floor, one-bedroom apartment, making no money. That's why I had to get a collapsible green screen. I would make dinner, and then I would move the dinner table out of the way and put up the collapsible green screen. I'm sitting in front of this camera, and for whatever reason, I'm uncomfortable. So, I keep kind of putting my chin like this when I talk, “Well, hey there. Welcome to this video.” What are you doing, young man? [laughter] That's how it goes.
You got to practice. You got to get involved with it. No weeks off. What happens after we commit to this consistent rhythm of publishing, is we start looking for what we call “viral for me, posts.” Not a viral post, viral for me. Viral for me is defined as any post we publish that reaches 10x the audience of a typical post of yours. In this era of social, this is realistic for every church. If you make something that's valuable, and I know you have valuable content, I've listened to sermons. We work with 165 churches every week. They send in sermons every week. We've been doing that for a lot of years. Do the math. Thousands of sermons I have reviewed. Every one has something valuable. If it's a Bible based sermon, there is wisdom in there that people will care about, if it's packaged up correctly. So, you look for a viral-for-me post. Suddenly-normally, you get 25 views. Normally you get 55 views. Normally you get 200 views-this one, Oh! 2000. Oh! 5000. What was that? It's a viral-for-me post. You've reached new audiences.
You can look into your analytics. It'll show followers versus non-followers, and all these people, non-followers, saw your stuff. Guess what? Disproportionately they are likely to be located close to your church, even if they don't know things about Jesus, because that's how distribution works now, which is awesome. The more of these that we stockpile, and roughly 3 to 5% of your posts viral for me. If there's one thing you write down that isn't in this, I'd write that down, 3 to 5% of your posts. The objective is for those to be viral for me, so don't be discouraged when you've been publishing twice a week for a few months and you haven't had one yet, 3 to 5%. The more of these that we stockpile, the sooner we can get to the third layer. We call this the 10x growth rate, defined as a 4% monthly growth threshold on social media. Really modest. Just 4% per month. But when that combines with no weeks off and the months and the years start to add up, it becomes quite dramatic, 10x growth over five years.
So, 200 followers today becomes 2000 in five years. This would have been unimaginable in the previous era of social. Yes, the people that chose to follow you were more likely to see your content than they are now, probably, but you would never have a chance at reaching new people that are not yet connected to your church, that are not yet connected to faith. Now we have that opportunity, and from there, crossover events. These are visitor cards being returned. Heard about your church on social. Conversations in the lobby with new families, “Oh yeah, we were following online for a little while, and we decided to finally check you out in person.” “What was the post?” Who knows? Cumulative effort. Or the ones that we see more and more often, pastors being recognized in their communities. You know how I recognize that guy that was cutting the giant slab of meat at the Brazilian steakhouse that is happening to pastors now all the time.
And this is my love language. It might not be yours. So, let's get into a couple of examples of that. This was one church we started working with. They came to me and they said, “We just want people to know our church exists. We just want them to know we're here.” We start working with them. He's, “Should we publish on Tiktok?” I say, “Look, you never know which platform is going to work for a church.” I can never predict it. We make a sermon clip, that's a vertical video, that's good for Instagram Reels, Facebook Reels, YouTube Shorts and Tiktok. He's, “We don't have a Tiktok.” I'm like, “Look, if you don't have moral qualms with it, open the account. We're doing the work to make this sermon clip, publish it there. We'll see what happens.” First month, a guy comes up to him at work. He's a bi-vocational pastor. “Are you a pastor?” They just started working together. He's like, “I actually am.” He's like, “You were on my TikTok feed this week.” He's like, “Oh, okay, that's strange. That's kind of cool.”
Later that week, he's going to get groceries. He tells me he was in a bad mood, and his wife, not a great day it sounds like, so he's waiting to get his groceries. He had called ahead to do like the pickup service, and he's in there. He's in a bad mood, and the guy finally collects his groceries, and he comes up and he's like, you can see it. “Are you a pastor? Because my family and I, my wife and I were new to this area, you came up in my feed like a bunch this week, like we were planning on checking your church out this weekend.” And this pastor is like, “I couldn't have imagined that would ever happen.” But that's the local component, and the more that you serve outside of a major metropolitan area, the more likely this is to happen, probably, but it's true for every church.
This is another example of a church that we were working with and really emphasizing that kind of rule of seven. It's probably not going to be one post that ever gets referenced, and every time you hear a story about life change happening or getting connected to someone for the first time, maybe it's not in person, maybe it's a DM, that one person and interaction is probably representative of 10 others that you'll never hear about. That's just kind of how it goes. So, it's always worth celebrating those life changing moments, and because no effort on social is wasted. This is also going to be true for people in your church. Again, I just can't emphasize enough, there are 168 hours in every week. Let's say one of those hours is Sunday, one and a half-two, Pentecostals, like four. There's still 167 hours outside of that where we can use digital platforms to reach people, reach people that we're not connected with, but reach the saints that we are connected with every single week. Remind them you're part of a faith family. Remind them of the wisdom of Scripture. You and I need it, and our churches need it just as much as people that don't know God as well, and digital platforms are great for that.
[John Borthwick]
Thanks for joining us on the Ministry Forum Podcast. We hope today's episode encouraged you and reminded you that you are not alone in ministry. If this episode resonated, tell someone, please don't keep us a secret, and if you can, subscribe, rate, or leave a review wherever you listen. It helps us reach more ministry leaders just like you. And honestly, it reminds us that we're not alone. Find more resources and ways to connect@ministryforum.ca and follow us on social media @ministryforum. Until next time, may God's strength and courage be yours. May you be fearless not reckless. May you be well in body, mind and spirit, and may you be at peace.