I know you wouldn’t be surprised if I told you social media is imperative to strengthening a modern church community and growing a church. I also know you wouldn’t be surprised if I told you that consistency is the number one key to social media. I know for a fact you wouldn’t be surprised if I told you staying consistent with social media is hard work, time consuming, and altogether intensive when done correctly. The reason I know you wouldn’t be surprised is that every single church that works with us at everything.church has a social presence, but very few of them use that presence to generate consistent results.
[Tweet “Most churches have a social presence, but very few generate consistent results.”]
i’ve got some very good news
We discovered a new tool recently that completely rocked our world. So I’m making a recommendation for a tool that we personally use at everything.church. I’m prescribing the medicine that I’m taking, so you know it has got to be good. It’s called CoSchedule. Essentially, it allows you to schedule your tweets and Facebook posts in advance. This is huge. This means you, or someone on your staff, can sit down for a few hours once a month and schedule out a visual calendar of social updates about the church along with some inspirational stuff. This means you don’t need to make a point of hopping on Twitter or Facebook at the right times through the week to make sure people stay updated. You just set it and forget it.
This is what the content calendar looks like at a glance.
i’ve got even better news still
CoSchedule allows you to do something called social automation. They like to call it ReQueue. This is going to blow your mind. Especially if you’re a social media guru who has been manually reposting socials for the last ten years.
ReQueue allows you to tag specific tweets and other social posts to be reused again in the future. CoSchedule’s intelligent system selects the social posts that engaged your congregation and community well, then takes those top performing posts and shares them again at a time they are most likely to be seen by your audience. This is perfect for sharing Bible verses, quotes from the Sunday sermon, or even song lyrics. Basically, anything that isn’t timely can be ReQueued. This means your social media accounts begin to automatically fill themselves with the best content you’ve created in the past!
Let’s say you wanted to share some quotes from your Sunday message on Facebook and Twitter. You would add them to CoSchedule and put them on the calendar where you would want those social posts to go live. While you’re posting, you can click a little ReQueue button that adds those posts into a system so CoSchedule will post them on your behalf in the future. Based on your chosen settings, CoSchedule will figure out which of your social posts got the most likes and shares so it knows to use those posts again in the future during times when you may not have anything scheduled for social media.
It’s basically a crockpot for social media. You can literally set it and forget it.
All of the stats about how well your socials are doing in one single place.
(DISCLOSURE: CoSchedule is giving us a discount in exchange for telling you all about how awesome it is. We would never recommend something we don’t truly believe in, so give CoSchedule a shot!)