Church Social Media Strategy – Researching Your Audience

When churches begin thinking about how they can use social media and the internet to do ministry online, it can be hard to know where to turn for valuable advice.

There are plenty of resources that talk about the ins and out of social media, how to use tools like Twitter and Facebook. I honestly think that more people go hungry in this country than those who go without hearing about social media. But it’s hard to know if you can trust the advice you’re getting from so-called social media experts.

And even if it comes from a reputable source, it’s hard to know how to apply that advice in a church setting. Most the discussion about social media talks about the public relations or marketing value. Sure a church has to consider those things, but is that where the value stops? Churches have more important work to do than just marketing, after all we’re in the business of creating eternal value.

Recently, there has been an increase in the amount of discussion of churches and social media. A number of church technology thought leaders are emerging.

But most of the discussion is still dominated by people telling churches that they should and shouldn’t do.

I question whether this type of “advice” is really helpful. Most of what I hear about churches using social media is conceptual insights based on personal experiences (“Social media is a conversation. Church congregations are using social media in their everyday life. Churches need to engage their congregations in these conversations.”).

Though fundamentally true statements, these generalizations are often stated as hard and fast rules while glossing over specific factors that might challenge their applicability to a church.

Should a church use social media?

It depends.

I believe that an effective church social media strategy depends on two things:

Who is the church is trying to reach?

What the church is trying to achieve?

Social media is about connecting people. If you don’t have an audience and purpose in mind, then your church’s social media efforts aren’t going to produce any value. If what your church is doing isn’t aimed at creating eternal value then you’re falling short of your calling.

What is the first step in developing a church social media strategy?

The first question every church should ask themselves when they start to think about how their church should approach social media is:

How is our congregation using social media?

Knowing how your congregation is currently engaging online will help your church identify the best social media tactics.

Focusing on what your audience is already doing helps simplify the process of selecting which social media tools to use. There are literally hundreds of different platforms out there, knowing the best one to choose can be difficult.

Focusing on your audience also helps you understand why they’re spending time online and whether contact with your church online will be unexpected. This helps you to know what changes in your audience’s behavior and attitudes are necessary if your church is going to have a positive impact on their lives online.

In order to answer this question, you need to know a number of things.

When I help churches to profile their congregations, I start with basic facts about the audience that helps to identify where and why they are engaging online. The three basic types of information about a church audience that provide insight into their online behavior are:

• Demographic – general factors about the audience that may influence their social media usage (e.g. age, gender and education)
• Psychographic – factors that influence how your audience thinks and behaves (e.g. motivations for going online)
• Behavioral – how your audience is currently engaging online (e.g. time spent online, devices used to connect to the Internet)

Most church leaders should be able to easily identify these things about their congregation.

As simple look around the sanctuary on Sunday should give you a good idea of the distribution of age and gender. You can probably make some assumptions about education and income levels based on demographic information of your church’s neighborhood.

There are a number of free, online tools for looking up demographic data by zip code. You can see the demographic information for 4th Reformed Church in Grand Rapids, MI (my church) on the right (source: ZipWho.com).

Based on this information, you can make assumptions about where your audience is engaging online.

Laura Aronsson and Bianca Male have written an article for OPEN Forum (a small business resource) where they use QuantCast data to describe the main users of the three biggest social networks: Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. They’ve taken a look at the basic demographic profiles of the uses of these networks to see if any factors influence preference of one network over another.

For my church in Grand Rapids, the average income in our neighborhood is $40,710. According to the QuantCast data, people at or below that income level are more likely to use Twitter than Facebook or LinkedIn. Because of this, Twitter seems to be the most effective tool for my church to reach the most people in our neighborhood.
I say “seems to be” because assumptions about your congregation and community are not 100 percent reliable for deciding how a church should use social media. It’s better than nothing and much preferable to making a decision just because a “church social media” expert says so.

Serious Church Social Media Audience Profiling

If you want to get serious about developing a church social media strategy it is valuable to research more specialized factors that influence how your church congregation will engage with your church online:

• Social behavior – how do the people in your church engage socially?
• Church behavior – how is your audience currently engaging with your church and church community, how will that translate online?
• Technographic – what type of Internet users are the people in your church? What is their natural tendencies for consuming, communicating, creating, and sharing online?

The above chart is from a recent church survey and shows whether or not the respondents engage in specific types of activities online. This level of information can create a richer understand of how your audience engages online and what your church can do that will establish and grow deeper relationships online. Getting this type of information takes some work. I’ll talk more in later posts about the techniques that I use when I help churches develop strategies for doing ministry online.

For now, I hope this has given you some ideas of how your church can get started thinking about which social media tools to use. Feel free to contact me if you’d like to discuss how I can help your church develop and implement a social media strategy.