Churches Shouldn’t Market Themselves (Do This Instead)

I’m often asked how to market a church, especially on social media. This is something many churches (most churches?) in the United States are wrestling with.

But let me give you a hack: you can (mostly) skip worrying about marketing, and focus on discipleship, instead. Your social media influence will grow, just the same.

Let me explain why.

A core idea of creating good social media content is to create content that is shareable. That means, create content people value and want to share with their friends. There are a lot of ways to accomplish this. One of the most obvious ways to create shareable content is to create funny content. People love sharing funny content. Alternatively, create very meaningful content. You get the idea.

If you can create shareable content, your influence spreads. (Click here to learn more about why specifically shareable content is so important)

Now, for-profit companies have to think about how to create meaningful, or funny, or otherwise shareable content. It takes work. But churches? Churches specialize in creating meaningful content. In fact, most pastors try to do that repeatedly, every Sunday.

So if you simply repackage the best content of a Sunday sermon…you’ve done half the work to creating shareable content.

Ok, cool. But so far, I’m still talking like a marketer. My promise was that you can skip marketing, and focus on discipleship instead….So….where’s the discipleship?

Let’s talk about social media, but from a different perspective. Instead of focusing on growing your audience, let’s talk about doing discipleship on, say, Instagram. How would you do that?

If you want to increase discipleship with Instagram, you might remind parishioners of the lessons your pastor taught on Sunday. After all, most of what she said on Sunday morning wasn’t intended for Sunday….it was intended for Monday, and Tuesday, and Wednesday, when parishioners are back at work, or back at school.

That is…If you wanted to do discipleship on Instagram, you would repackage and share Sunday morning content, to help keep people engaged in discipleship to Jesus.

Notice: this would be deeply meaningful content.

So here’s my hack:

Instead of asking “how do I create shareable content that will grow our social media influence,” ask “what did the preacher want people to remember on Tuesday?” Whatever the answer to that question is, post that.

Ideally, you come up with a few pieces of content like that each week. But make it true. Make it meaningful. You’ll be doing the same thing you need to do, anyway.