You would have to have been living under a rock for the last twenty years if you don’t know anything about social media. My parents refuse to get on it, and they even know what Facebook and Instagram are. There are plenty of studies that are out on the world wide web any more about the dangers that exist with social media and being dependent on it. Despite this, there are still many good uses for sociaal media. We don’t want to through the baby out wiht the bathwater.
This post is specifically geared toward the person or people who are leading or teaching small groups/Sunday school classes. There are many advantages to social media and knowing how to utilizing them will help you grow your groups, desperse information, and can even assist with maintaining relationships within the group.
Why Use Social Media
As I’ve already hinted at, social media is a great way to market a church or a small group. Why?
- Almost everyone is on social media in some form
- Social Media is mainly visual
- Easy way to market ministry
- Can be managed from a phone
- It’s FREE
In my opinion, this is really all that I need to justify getting a group on social media. In the wider discussion, this is great for churches. It allows for church to distribute information in a concise format that the majority of the congregation is able to to have access to. You can also make sure of free tools to create the posts. I personally like to use Canva, but if you are more talented, yu might want to invest in something like Adobe.
Know Your Audience
This goes without saying, but you need to create content for social media that is going to appeal to the audience that you want to reach. Some of the platforms that are the most widely used are Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Tik-Tok, and Twitter.
Different age groups tend to gravitate towards different platforms. Many of the peple who are may parents’ age tend to be on Facebook, while those who are part of my demographic (millenials) utilize Instagram more, but have Facebook accounts since that was what was availabel when we were in highschool and college. Personally, I’ll post to Instagram, and I have it linked to my Facebook account – I like to keep up with friends from highs chool, anand some of those awesome older ladies I grew up with. However, I rarely post straight to Facebook.
Some groups may do better with Twitter – but I’ve noticed that those tend to be people that are in the professional realm and want to chime in on topics of interest. As for Snapchat and Tik-Tok, I think that it is worth discussing. Tik-Tock needs to be done well for it to be effective as a way to group and share at the Small Groupl level. If you are going to do it, probably the groups that would want to utilize it the most would be groups made up on millenials, or youth grups. And if you are
wanting to ggreat something for a Children’s Group, remember that you aren’t actually crating content for children, you are creating content for the parents.
Know Your Purpose
You cannot begin a social media account that is willy-nilly. Otherwise it will not reach the people that you want it to be reaching. A point to keep in mind,: what a church does for social media is not what the Small Grop or the Sunday School Class should be doing for social media. As I’ve said, social media can be sued as a marketing tool. For the local church, this means that they should be utilizing it to share the mission and vision of the church with those who are not regular attenders, and to help get people from the community to find their posts and want to visit. They can highlight all the ministries and activities that are taking place, a snippet from the week’s sermon, or if there is a campaign like Lottie Moon Christmas Offering (for those who are Southern Baptist) and what teh goals are. I’ve seen some churches do the week of prayer, or announce when a ministies goal has been reached.
In contrast. if a Small Group or Sunday School is using social media they are doing so with the intent of marketing internally to those who are in the group and those who are regular church attendees. If you are a leader or teacher, you’ll know that it is hard work to gt people interested in a group, since it is a committment, and generally speaking Westerners doen’t really like committments. Another way to look at it if you come from a business background is that you are selling your small group to the church as a whole, while the church is selling itself to the local community.
For this reason, it is important to select the best form platform for your pupose. This means you will need to know the demographic of your group, which brings up back to the discussion of Instagram verses Facebook, and whether Tik-Tok is a valid platform – my answer to that is that it depends on various factor that I’m getting into here.
Things to Keep in Mind
Although the church is not a business, there are some business like aspects to it that help make sure the mission and vision are being communicated across all channels. Therefore, there are a few things that Small Groups and Sunday School Classes utilizing social media (and making posts) will want to keep in mind.
A. Stick to the your church’s colors, the logo, and the font. The general content is as much a part of the brand as how it looks.
B. Remember to keep the picture a picture, there is no need to crowd the graphic. You can always include the information in the written section of the post.
C. People – social media posts that show people (especially happy people) will do better than posts that are only graphics.
D. Consistancy – you wantt to make sure that you are posting for your group on the regular. You’ll never build a following if you are only posting once or twice a month.
Road Trippin With Rachael 
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