social media

Is your church finally ready to dive in and start using Instagram? While you're nowhere near the last church on earth to take the plunge and join the Insta-church party, you will be joining this online community at a time when the platform is at its peak. Churches and users have learned some pretty savvy tricks to keep their accounts visible, viral, and performing their best. So where do you start?

As we become more dependent on technology, security threats grow and change on a daily basis and user data continues to be vulnerable. This is true for churches, just as it is for any other organization or business. Learning to keep online data and accounts safe and being reminded to regularly update security protocols is increasingly important for pastors and church communicators.

Instagram has become the ‘place to be’ for social sharing of images and videos for individuals, businesses, and organizations like churches. With nearly a billion users, it also seems to be the place for fun. Ask any millennial and they will say Instagram is where they spend their time following and catching up on the news of the day and with their own social circles.

What makes one social network stand out from the rest in our techno-saturated, app-centric digital world? Instagram has taken the world by storm and created legions of devoted users and followers. 2017 saw its member base surge to 800 million individual users and 25 million business users.

Searching online for information about people, places, products, and organizations is commonplace in our digital age. Most of us are doing multiple searches daily or even hourly. Tools like Google Places and Yelp provide valuable information about the establishments we want to visit, like restaurants, stores, schools, and even churches.

Graphics design and social media go hand-in-hand. For the church communicator and pastor who need to have all social media channels firing at all times, knowing what sized images and graphics to use both for personal accounts as well as for church social media channels is very important to appear professional and engaged. 

Social media is both a blessing and a curse. If you've spoken with anyone recently about Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, I'm sure you've...

We all want to keep up with communication trends so that we can reach our world. We remind ourselves that the Apostle Paul said “I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some. I do all this for the sake of the gospel” (1 Cor. 9:22,23a). Though we work hard to do that, we also need to be realistic as we work to apply what is currently useful in the secular communication world and how that will work out in the crucible of church culture.