Does your church have a fan page on Facebook? How often and what content do you post to it?
Since launching our fan page at The Chapel, we have a couple of items we try to post every week, but everything else is posted on the fly. The issue with inconsistency is:
- Some days we have zero posts, and other days we might overload folks with content.
- Everything comes out looking like an afterthought — As if we don’t care about our Facebook fans.
Since we’re communicating to 1,500 fans now, the communications team is trying to add a little method to the madness that is Facebook fan page posting. What do you think about this schedule?
MONDAY: Any big events coming up in the week. If there aren’t “big” events, then just a link to the events page on Chapel.org.
TUESDAY: Video of the previous weekend’s message.
WEDNESDAY: Video announcements from a couple of people on the communications team. We’ve had HUGE success with this in the past, but posting has been inconsistent. Here’s an example.
THURSDAY: Connections ministry. The director of this has admin rights to the fan page, and will decide what internal communications/connections news needs to go out.
FRIDAY: Post YouTube video of the upcoming weekend’s closing song. Live concert footage or music video from the actual band who recorded it. This has been successful in the past as well.
ONGOING: Here are items that will get posted as needed.
- Upload photos from events
- Pick staff facebook profiles at random and promote
- Promote individual campus facebook pages
- Importing news from the homepage of chapel.org
- Would be fun to have the senior pastors post periodic webcam videos — devotions, what’s God teaching them, challenges
- Promotion videos from the weekend
- Links to files of resources handed out on the weekend
- Random announcements/cancellations
What about you?
What’s your strategy? Do you even feel the need for a strategy? What’s wrong with our strategy? Join in the conversation.
Great post , absolutely great! We will be using this as part of our web presence launch for sure.
Just fantastic advice, thanks so much!
Great ideas thanks!
Matthew, Clayton, and Eric. Thanks for the kind words. Glad this can be a helpful resource for you guys.
The discipline of a set schedule is very helpful. You may want to consider building in time to regularly evaluate how well you are engaging your audience, such as by looking at Facebook Insights http://www.facebook.com/insights/ or your other metrics, and making adjustments as necessary. Scheduling time to follow up and respond to comments should be part of a Facebook strategy as well.
We’ve had success on our page (facebook.com/wilds) by pre-composing status updates for an entire season - fall, winter, spring, etc. A post a day seems to drive fans away, but having just a little bit of duplicate content from the “official” page is enough to whet theie appetite for more. We usually post Monday, Thursday, or Tuesday, Friday, and we’ve only had <12% of Fans leave or hide us from their news feed in the 2+ years we’ve had the Page.. Pictures and videos seem to help as well..
Love this! thanks.
This is timely and provides some good things that every ministry should think through. The problem with most Church Facebook fan pages is that they can (and will) become stale and outdated if there is no strategy (and person responsible) for keeping the community engaged. So, creating a strategy will help.
I like your suggestions for “pushing” information out, but a bigger challenge is to create engagement so that the church community begins to interact in some meaningful way as opposed to passively listening. If anyone has some suggestions of things that help with that - I’m listening!