Church Highlight: Potomac Valley Church

Editor's Note: After two calendar years like none in human history, technology has only pivoted further into solving every day problems. Whether it's the regular collaboration Zoom meeting with your team at work, live-streaming your Sunday service from Facebook, or learning how to stay connected with close friends and family via FaceTime, the world's reliance on tech-driven solutions has grown sevenfold since early 2020.

The Potomac Valley Church took hold of the increase in tech-use over the last two years and invested heavily in their church Instagram, growing it by tens of thousands of engaged followers.

We wanted to include this amazing church success story at the top of this blog post, to give vision for the churches just started on their social media journey. In today's day and age, the sky is the limit.

When asked about what has been the greatest blessing for the Potomac Valley Church in their social media growth, Lead Pastor Will Archer said:

The past 18 months have been some of the most transformative for us as a church. We have navigated and are still navigating the tumultuous triad challenges of a global pandemic, socio-political realignment and the subsequent mental health crisis that results from the prior stated challenges. We are without a doubt in the midst of the greatest changes that the Church has seen in 500 years. It is in this context that our social media presence has proven to be invaluable to our testifying to the Gospel. We have witnessed nothing short of miraculous growth in this regard. For example, in May of 2020, we had less than 1,500 followers on Instagram; today we have over 45,700. This means that for the past several months our posts on Instagram alone reaches over a million people a month. That is a million people we were not connected with a year ago. This example and many others have convinced us that we have entered the golden age of spreading the Gospel. We are sobered by the losses and broken by the tragedies of our new century but they have served to galvanize our resolve and concretize our conviction that the Gospel is the answer. We are grateful to be on this “New Roman Road” of the internet despite the danger. We will utilize it as they did in the 1st century to reach billions in the 21st century. The journey has just begun.

Even if you don't have a social media account at all for your local church, it's not too late to start. As you brainstorm and consider the best method and platform for your specific church, here are some helpful considerations that will make your social media strategy clean, professional, and effective for spreading the gospel.

12 Strategies to Boost Church Social Media Growth and Engagement

Psychology has told us two things about first impressions:

1. People make first impressions based on appearances
2. First impressions are very hard to change

If you can be intentional about the way you present yourself, then you can play an active role in how you are perceived.

This has significant implications for your church’s social media strategy.

Your church’s social media presence says something about your church.

Let me explain:

You can make a positive, enduring effect on someone’s willingness to attend your church with the way you portray your church’s presence online.

The key to creating a great first impression with those who find your church online has everything to do with implementing the right social media strategy.

If you mail it in and use an outdated social media strategy, you could very well be pushing young people away from your church.

Here’s the good news:

There are simple steps to creating a church social media strategy for church growth that will make young people flock to your church. 

If you decide to use these steps, you’ll not only attract young people to your church—you’ll become the church that young people in your area will want to attend. 

1. Create social media mission statement

Before you even pick a twitter username, you need to sit down and meet with your church team to answer one question:

Why are we creating a social media presence?

• Are you creating a social media presence just for you?
• Are you creating a social media presence just to look cool?
• Are you creating a social media presence because you want to look hip?
• Are you creating a social media presence because you’re scared of falling behind the times?
  

These are all bad reasons to create a social media presence.

Social media is just one way of communicating with people in the world.

Beneath the “Why?” of your social media should be a deeper question:

Why do we interact with people?

The answer should be clear:

As a church, we have a mission to communicate the gospel as excellently as possible and to make servant-hearted disciples of Jesus Christ.

There you go. 

Your purpose is evangelism. 

Your standard is excellence. 

Your aim is maturity and love.

Most churches who struggle with social media are fearless in sharing the gospel.

Most churches who struggle with social media are passionate about maturity and selfless service.

If that’s your church, and you struggle to create a social media strategy in which you feel confident, that’s because you’re struggling with how to communicate and practice the gospel excellently.

That’s a very important realization your church leadership team needs to have:

If we create a social media presence for our church, it should be excellent.

If you can start with excellence, you will have the posture of a learner.

If you start with excellence, you won’t be satisfied with cliche, tired, ineffective social media strategies.

If you start with excellence, your social media strategy might not be a home run right out of the gate, but it will become a home run.

And it’s important to recognize that many churches who think they are good at social media violate some key principles of excellent communication that explain why they can’t get any real traction for church growth from the internet.

Begin with a mission for your church’s social media.

Don’t skip this important step.

2. Pick a social media sharing service

Ask one of the younger people in your church who knows about social media:

What are the best tools for managing our online presence?

There are many great church social media management products such as Buffer, Coschedule, and Hootsuite.

Once you create your social media, consolidate their management into a single place and assign a point-person to run your accounts. 

3. Create a brand manual

Once you’ve created your social media, consolidated them onto a single management platform, and assigned management responsibilities to a competent member of your team, task them to do this:

Create a brand manual.

A brand manual doesn't have to be long.

A brand manual can be a single page.

A brand manual simply expresses what your communicative strategies will be for social media.

For example:

• Only use high quality, light-oriented images from a specific site
• Create a clean, uncluttered aesthetic that looks like it represents a unified brand and vision
• When custom colors are used, select from these specific three colors
• Do not post about politics
• The voice of social media will be a collective representation of church leadership, not the idiosyncratic voice of the social media manager
• Do not post images or text relating to drugs, alcohol, or profanity
• Do not engage in lengthy social media debates with those who post negative comments on our posts
• Do not post low-resolution, low-quality images.
  

This brand manual can be tailored to each church to capture the tone and voice that the church wants to create as it cultivates its online presence. 

The brand manual should be an open document that grows and changes as the church’s social media presence becomes clearer through maturity over time.

4. Use quality media tech

Social media is meant to be consumed over one’s phone, but this is where many churches make the common mistake of producing their content through the mobile phone.

Do not produce your social media content through your phone.

Your media assets should be produced on a desktop for several reasons.

First, images should either be high quality stock images from an aesthetically appealing website or church images from a high quality camera used in church.

Underexposed and off-hue photographs serve as a blotch on your social media presence and communicate that your church is unconcerned with excellence in the church.

If you want to post pictures of your church on social media, then create a strategy to produce excellent pictures.

Second, social media text content should be written offline. It’s easier to write better content on your computer than on your phone. 

This doesn’t mean you can’t manage social media from your phone. But your content should be produced through professional protocol that is part of an intentional workflow on a desktop.

Otherwise, your social media copy and media will have an amateur feel that will communicate “old person using new technology” to social media users, which will more often repel than attract.

Get a high quality camera, use a high quality stock photo website, and produce high quality audio and video.

5. Ditch over-the-top filters

When Instagram’s popularity started surging in 2011, it was very popular to put various filters on your photos such as sepia, “old film” templates, and high-contrast, high-grain modulation.

Don’t do this.

Produce media good enough that, under the worst circumstances needs very little editing, and, under the best circumstances, needs no editing at all.

This goes for video, audio, images, and text.

Professionalism without flare is feels too corporate.

Social media fads without professionalism are tacky.

Professionalism with a subtle flare to inflect the viewer’s attention should be your aim in all images, writing, sharing, and posting.

6. Post more videos

Video is the wave of the future.

If you’re writing more than 100 words on social media, nobody is reading it. 

Create high-quality video content that is easily shareable. 

This can be on YouTube, but even better are 30-60 second clips from your sermons that are focused on a particular issue or topic that viewers will want to share.

Simply include a watermark in the corner of the video that promotes your church and share it from your church’s account.

People will like, follow, and engage with your online presence if you can create and package content that works well on social media which, again, is currently very short-form video content.

7. Create social friendly paid ads

Many of the highest-converting social media ads today are videos of leaders making a high-energy, condensed appeal to the viewer while looking straight into the camera.

Don’t spend your time talking. Spend your time writing the perfect script for you video so that it only needs to be fifteen seconds long.

Make the video personal, incentivizing, humorous, professional, substantive, and practical. Make sure it meets these six criteria.

Here are a few example scripts that could work very well for a church invitation:

“Hey I’m Pastor Bill at South Hampton Baptist. Listen, before I was a pastor I struggled getting to church on time. Here’s the deal: We’re offering free lattes at our church coffee shop for everyone who shows up 15 minutes early to our 10:30 service this Sunday. Hey, I’m not above bribing you to come to church! Hope to see you there this Sunday, August 15th.”

“Are you stressed about finding an Easter egg hunt this Sunday? We’ve got the biggest Easter egg hunt in town with games for kids and endless Five Guys burgers for adults. Sounds too good to be true? Hey, it’s Easter. Crazier things have happened on Easter Sunday. 

Come to Emmanuel Church this Sunday for the most elaborate easter egg hunt in town. We’ve got the Easter Bunny. We’ve got endless burgers. Come join us for the 10:30 service and experience an Easter you’ll never forget.”

Keep it short and sweet. Give a clear call to action with details.

Depending on the size of your church, your budget for a social media ad might only be $200, but that $200 will go a long way when you can target the ad to people only in your city of a certain demographic, and with young children.

Social media ads may feel like a vanity purchase, but I assure you—they are not. For example, when it comes to Facebook ads, there are several legit reasons your church should consider running ads on that platform.

8. Focus on emails, not followers

Churches commonly make the mistake of focusing too much on the numbers under their social media accounts, and not enough on the actual relationships with the people who follow them.

It’s important to remember that the social media platforms own your relationship with all of your followers. 

However, if you can convert those followers into email subscribers, then you own that email list.

You own that relationship—not the social media company.

It’s crucial that you have an email signup form prepared that you regularly share on social media. 

There are several good email subscription services, such as MailChimp, ConvertKit, and Drip.

Pick one and build your list.

If you’re new to email list building, then I recommend using MailChimp.

MailChimp is free and very versatile.

Once you build a more sophisticated platform, you can consider more advanced options such as ConvertKit and Drip to capture more emails and more effectively market your church to your local area.

9. Give more than you take

There is a business personality who is very successful on social media named Gary Vaynerchuck — or “Gary Vee,” as he calls himself.

Gary has a great social media philosophy called “Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook.”

The basic premise is that 3/4 of your social media posts should add value, and only 1/4 of your social media should be self-promoting.

His point is this:

If people experience your social media account as primarily adding value rather than requesting value, then when you ask for something from your audience (such as “Come to church!”), they will be more inclined to trust that your request will add value to their lives.

In other words:

Don’t swarm your followers with requests.

Your “Add value” to “Request” ratio should be 3:1. 

10. Member highlights

When you share content about your church, don’t let it be too corporate.

Showcase your happy, lovely, fun-having church members at events so that people will wish they were at your church.

A picture of someone clearly enjoying the world’s best-looking cheeseburger at your church is a much better way to market your church BBQ than a word-picture that says, “Come to our church BBQ!” 

Featuring church member highlights accomplish two things for your church’s social media strategy:

1. It communicates that you actually care about your members
2. It shows rather than explains your call-to-action (a picture of people having fun is always more persuasive than a tweet that says, “Join us! We love to have fun!”
   

Member highlights are a way of proving to onlookers that your church really is a place that people should want to belong.

11. Partner with other churches on social/crossovers

Sometimes churches can have a bad reputation for not “playing nice” with other churches. 

Be the counter-culture in your town.

If you’re a pastor, go to the basketball night at another church and post on your church’s social media account how much fun the other church is. 

You won’t lose people to his church.

If anything, people will see that you’re a generous, fun-loving, friendly pastor who cares more about building relationships than building a following.

You will never lose by partnering with other pastors to promote their churches.

You will build social capital and a reputation for loving generosity that will be irresistible for people looking for a church with a pastor who is caring, warm, fun, and not puffed up with his own ego.

12. Run giveaways

Run monthly giveaways on your social media to grow it initially.

Give away:

• tickets to local sporting events
• gift cards to restaurants
• Free books from the church library
• Movie tickets to the local IMAX theater
  

Give away things that cost you less than $50 but could gain you hundreds of local followers.

Make your only condition to enter the competition that followers must:

• Be a new follower within the past week
• Share the giveaway on their social media with the hashtag #YourChurchsName
  

Giveaways are a largely underrated strategy for gaining followers.

Don’t neglect it.

Over to you

If you utilize these social media strategies for your church, your chances of growing your social media following drastically increase. 

The reason your chances increase is that these strategies will make your online presence more and more excellent.

The better you get at giving, the more people will be interested in belonging at your church and engaging in your community.