Simple Social Scheduling for Your Church’s Facebook Fan Page
Your church should have a Facebook fan page. If they don’t already have one, you should start it. Yes, you. (As the saying goes, “If not you, who? If not now, when?”)
You’ve probably heard the stats by now, but just in case you haven’t:
- More than 400 million active users
- Average user has 130 friends
- People spend over 500 billion minutes per month on Facebook
- Average user is connected to 60 pages, groups and events
- About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States
As you can see, there are a lot of people using Facebook. People near. People far. People who live in your city or town and may not have heard about your church.
You really should change that. Like, now. The good thing is that it’s easy. Real easy.
Enter the Stream
One easy way to gain a voice for your church in the Facebook web-o-sphere is by creating a Facebook fan page. It’s a skill that every person should pick up now that we’re in the age of digital ministry. (If you’re looking for a basic basic tutorial on how to create a fan page, watch these videos I put together for our staff here at Lutheran Church of Hope. Here and here.)
Once you’ve got a page going, the next step is mastering the update. It does no good to have a fan page and never update it. Dormant fan pages are worse than no fan page at all. A fan page with months between updates says, “We started this on whim without thinking through what we would do with it after we got started.” Now you have fans and they’re all wondering, “Where did my church go?” Make sure you measure the cost before you start. Don’t start without a process in place.
An easy way to make sure your page is getting update is by forming a schedule. Have a schedule in place that you can fall back on when time comes at a premium. Scheduling makes updates automatic.
Schedule It!
Here at Hope, I put together this handy little workflow so I never have to wonder, “What am I going to post about today?”
As you can see, there’s a mix of what we update on throughout the week:
- Conversation starters
- Devotional thoughts
- Church-wide events we think people would enjoy
- A look at the weekend
- Invitation to weekend services
You Can Do This
It’s not rocket science, but combine that with scheduled updates from Tweetdeck and you’re good to go. Set some time aside each week, preferably the same time for consistency’s sake, and schedule your updates out. I do mine on Monday mornings for the entire week, following this schedule pretty closely. It’s powerful. It’s predictable. It’s a good mix. It’s fun to see how people engage the material each week. Plus, I’ve eliminated the “did I update Facebook today?” question from my mind. That, my friends, is golden.
Now you can focus more time on interacting with your people and less time on the implementation. After all, your people are what it’s all about, right? You can focus on answering the questions that will arise, encouraging your people, and sending prayer requests that bubble up on your page to your prayer team. A simple way to leverage the social web for the sake of the Kingdom!
We’ve grown our Facebook fan page to over 3500 people in six months using this strategy. It’s simple and effective and it costs nothing to implement. Start scheduling and watch what happens!
Do you have any sure-fire methods you use to update your social networks? What works? What doesn’t? Share below in the comments.
Awesome. The Tweetdeck idea is going to cut hours out of my week.
What a great idea! I like the idea of adding devotionals and questions instead of just posting about the same events week after week.
I love that you're helping to equip the Church to embrace the digital space and go where the conversation is online. These are great resources JWise. Keep up the good work!
Thanks man. We are going to start using this.
And the best part? ANYONE can do it …. Glad this was helpful.
WEEHOO! Open-source ideas rule!
Justin: Really love this post, and just sent the link to a nonprofit group that's looking to beef up its Facebook presence. The act of scheduling content items and thinking about the specific “buckets” they fall into is a good way to stay on target and disciplined.
Wow. Thanks for the forward, Bob. I appreciate it.
Justin: Really love this post, and just sent the link to a nonprofit group that's looking to beef up its Facebook presence. The act of scheduling content items and thinking about the specific “buckets” they fall into is a good way to stay on target and disciplined.
Wow. Thanks for the forward, Bob. I appreciate it.