Transcription
(bright music) - No fancy edit today. It is 7:30 AM. And I am seated in front of a local Anglican church to, once and for all, give you formulas for church social media promotion. Not post ideas, promotion. How to do it right to get people to actually sign up for stuff and get involved at church.
I dragged poor Alex out here before the crack of dawn. Oh, what a nice guy. Also, if you go to the URL on the screen or scan the QR code, you'll find the downloadable library of promotion formulas so you can reference them easily. We've put that together for you.
This all starts with three rules. These three rules will define the formulas I'm about to share with you. If you don't follow these rules, the formulas don't work.
Rule number one is respect the no promo code. There is an unwritten social contract that exists between people that use social media and creators that publish on social. If you break this rule, nothing else I say can help your church. Sadly, though, this is what most churches do.
So here's the bottom line. No one opens a social media app to see a promotion. This is the no promo code. Think about it this way. I open Instagram, I wanna be entertained, perhaps I wanna be educated. I want to catch up with what's happening in the world. These are reasons why I open a social app, but I have zero desire to see a sale or promotion, meaning the algorithm is not gonna show me promos because they'll make me that much more likely to close the app.
So what does this mean for your church? If you publish a traditional promo post, and by that, I might mean something like a graphic with text, "Summer Camp Registration Now Open!" And there are the dates there, cost, details, below that headline. That's gonna perform poorly. Why? Because it breaks the no promo code. Nobody wants to see that on their feed. Instagram knows this, so they're not gonna show it to people. Your post then bombs because of all the negative signals the algorithm receives from it. And the worst part is that these posts don't exist in a vacuum, meaning the next thing you publish will be negatively impacted by that previous promotional post. So you can see how a church's entire social presence can get sewered by this type of thing very quickly. Respect the no promo code.
Rule number two is earn attention and build trust. If you're thinking, "Brady, this video is trash. You're supposed to help us promote on social. Rule one is telling us you can't do it." Correct. You can't do it the wrong way. Creators on social promote every single day. Your church can do the same thing, but you first must have possession of these two things. Attention and trust.
How do you get attention and trust? By respecting rule number one and showing you can be a good digital citizen on social media, don't break the code, and then by creating content that people do want to see. And committing to this indefinitely with a no weeks off approach. The great news is this. Churches are in a better position to do this than virtually any other institution in the world because our senior leaders already create content on a weekly basis in the form of sermons. So the heavy lifting, it's already done. We just need to repurpose that content for social.
If you want to outsource this part of the process, this is what we do at SocialSermons. The average church working with us sees engagement increase 32x in the first 12 months. And do you know what that metric demonstrates? 32 times more engagement. It is a byproduct of attention and trust, and that's the equity we need to see our promos perform well on social. All month long in August, when you set up for an annual plan at socialsermons.com, you can get three months free. Go to socialsermons.com to check it out.
Now, whether you outsource your weekly social media calendar to someone like me and my team, or you do it yourself, the key is being consistent. No weeks off. And week over week, you begin to build attention and trust with people, which now brings us to rule number three.
Use unlimited sprinkle promos. Sprinkle promos are the secret to social media promotion done right. What are they? Sprinkle promos are not a core ingredient of the post. They're just a little sprinkle on top. For example, I just included a sprinkle promo in this video when I talked to you about SocialSermons a moment ago. This video is gonna be what? 10 minutes long, 15 minutes long, something like that. And that SocialSermon's promo was maybe 30 seconds. So it's less than 5% of the total video. It is a sprinkle promo. I'm able to talk about a service my company offers without damaging the views or overall watch time of this video. Why? Because the promo is brief and relevant.
Now imagine if this video started and it was just 15 minutes of promotion for SocialSermons. Well, that's not why you go to YouTube. You're gonna click away. That video would bomb. It would negatively affect distribution on my next video as well. It would hurt the channel. What I love about sprinkle promos is that they give you the freedom to promote as frequently as you want on social media without any negative effect. You can do a new promo every single day if you want. You just need to do it right.
And now that we have our three rules for church social media promotion, we can get into actual formulas for sprinkle promotions and how to do them right.
Formula number one is carousels. Let's start easy. This is strictly an Instagram format of post, though it will work for both the feed and stories. Let's say it's the youth ministry retreat this fall. Okay. Grab three photos from last year's retreat, load them up into a carousel, and then use the final slide to promote. You can make a graphic there with the time, the dates, and the cost, and whatever, go sign up for more. Basically, the same graphic that would bomb if it was the title slide. After you've earned some attention and trust, it's a good post. It's valuable on its own. There's no harm in that type of promo.
If you go to my Instagram, you can see I do this on basically every carousel. The content comes first, and then I'll either make a promo to this YouTube channel or our podcast, or I'll just say, "Like and save this post, and follow this account for more." And if you're unsure about the idea of using photos because you don't think your church has any good ones, check out The Church Smartphone Photography Masterclass, a free video on this channel. We'll link it in the description. I can teach you to take good photos with just your phone, I promise.
Formula number two, skit reels. The value proposition in a post like this is typically comedy, entertainment. This type of post will work on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube Shorts, because it's in vertical video format. It's very versatile. I've included 10 different examples of this in the description. So you can see how churches are doing this. If you're like, "What does skit reel even mean?" Just watch those examples.
And if you want an endless supply of creative ideas for this type of post, it is quite simple. Click and watch all 10 of the posts I've linked in the description. Give each of them a like and save them, and that's all your Instagram algorithm will need to show you more. And then every time you open your Instagram, just go to your reels feed and you'll get fresh new inspiration curated for you. Done.
Now what I love about those two formulas that I just shared with you is that they essentially provide you a foundation to promote any day of the week, anything you'd like, using the two most popular formats on social right now, vertical video and carousels. But let's get a bit more advanced now in our next formula, I call this the poll precursor, and this is specifically for Instagram and Facebook stories.
Okay. Let's get into using stories now, using some of the creative elements that the apps provide for us. The way to make this promo is simple. First, pick the event that you wanna promote. Let's say you're making a big push for small groups and then make a story using the poll feature where you ask a question related to small groups. For example, let's say you're the type of church that has small groups for all types of things. Basketball, book club, walking, entrepreneurship. So you ask the question using the poll feature, "Which of these activities do you most enjoy? You can only pick one." People choose their answer. And then on the next story, you publish a slide that says, "We have small groups for all of them. Reply GROUPS and we'll send you the link to explore all of our group options." Or you can also just use the link sticker to link them directly to the appropriate spot on your website for signup.
Let's try another event example. Let's say it's a community barbecue. The poll question could be, "What's the best option at a barbecue, hotdog or hamburger?" And then on the next slide, you can say, "Whatever you like, we'll have both at our next community barbecue," blah, blah, blah. The poll precursor works because it leads with engagement that's relevant to your event, so it can increase attention. And then you follow with the promo afterwards. Sprinkle.
There are variations on this that you can try as well. For example, substitute the quiz sticker for the poll sticker. So instead of asking for an opinion, you're asking for someone to sleuth out the correct answer before introing the event. For example, last year we served 211 hotdogs and hamburgers at our community barbecue. Which do you think we serve more of, hot dogs or hamburgers?
To formula number four now, our final one. And I want to emphasize here that the idea of a sprinkle promo is not just limited to social. It works in service. It works anywhere. So long as the promo is not the core ingredient of whatever you're doing, you can always sprinkle it in there, and it will be more effective than if you did an entire segment dedicated to promotion, because you start with attention and trust. You've already earned the equity with your audience.
So for example, pastors can weave sprinkle promos into their sermons from stage. The easy way to do this is to first identify the missional reason for an event's existence. So going back to the community barbecue. Reason, an event like that exists is for what, fellowship, being a light in the community, sharing a meal together. So now, understanding that, anytime a part of the sermon approaches one of those core scriptural ideas, that's an organic opportunity to take a second and say, "Hey, one of the ways that we pursue fellowship at our church is our community barbecue. It's happening this day. We'd love to see you there." And the sermon continues. So this verbiage of sprinkle promos, I encourage you, start using it in your church everywhere because it is incredibly potent.
And one of the ways that we can dial up the potency even more is when we have an organic sprinkle promo campaign that doesn't just last one week or one post, but is ongoing, and it gets handed off between in-person services and social media. So let's talk through an example. I call this the handoff. Our event is gonna be fall festival. We're gonna plan to promote this event for six consecutive weeks, and our objective is to maximize attendance.
So we start with week one. We announced fall festival, but with a twist. This week on Instagram, you're gonna be posting a trivia question about last year's fall festival. For example, "What was our theme?" Now, don't tell people the trivia question ahead of time. I'm just giving you the example there. But the idea is that one person who answers the question correctly and is following the church on Instagram will get a $20 voucher for food at fall festival, or something of actual value. So we make that post on Instagram stories and Facebook stories during the week.
And then the following Sunday at church, we're now into week two of our campaign. We show the trivia question, we reveal the correct answer, we announce the winner, and then inform the church. We're gonna be doing the same thing this week, but with a new fall festival-related trivia question. Into the next week, we repeat the cues from the previous week, but now, instead of siloed announcements, you've got this campaign that's building momentum with each passing week, and that carryover effect is putting a greater spotlight on fall festival. Yet, despite this being a clear promo for the event, the focus is actually on the competitive element of the trivia questions and who's winning each week. Those are the core ingredients. So the promo is actually still just a sprinkle on top.
Now into week four. We repeat the cues from the previous week, and would you look at that? Amazingly, our Instagram metrics are creeping up because more people are engaging with our stories, more people are also seeing our other content, and we're starting to generate this positive flywheel effect where everything is working together.
To week five. Again, we repeat the cues from the previous week. This week, we also check your followers on Instagram. They've gone up. Because we required a person to be following the church to be eligible for the prize, a number of people in the congregation actually started following that weren't previously.
And then finally, week six. We made it. Announce the final winner and then bask in the glow of the record fall festival attendance numbers from the brilliant campaign you just executed. Not to mention, all the momentum that you built on social at the same time. All from sprinkle promotions.
Sprinkle promos are the secret sauce to getting people involved in church life without exhausting them with constant reminders. But again, we need these to work alongside our no weeks off approach to social and our consistent sermon-related content. That's the foundation. If you do want to outsource that part, head to socialsermons.com. You can book a call with me. All month long in August, you can get three months free on any of our annual plans. We ran the numbers. The average church using SocialSermon sees engagement increase 32x in the first 12 months. That's the gas that we want to pour on your sprinkle promos to see next steps skyrocket at your church.
Remember to download the promo library as well, linked in the description. There are more formulas in there than we've covered in this video, and they're organized in a more visibly accessible format so you don't have to deal with my offensive handwriting.
One more important note, I know how important real examples are for stuff like this. So what I've done is, I asked on my Instagram stories for all of you to send in events that you need promos for. And on tomorrow's podcast, Alex and I are going to, in real time, create sprinkle promos using these formulas for real church events that you've sent in. So subscribe to the Pro Church Tools Show, YouTube channel, or wherever you get your podcasts. We've got it linked in the description below, and we'll see you on that episode tomorrow where we take these ideas and really put them to work. Thanks as always for your time, attention, and trust. I'll talk to you tomorrow.
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