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💥Erik w/a "k" Channel [Practical Youth Ministry Tips]💥

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DESCRIPTION
We all want more people at our events, but how do we get more people at our events without promoting things to Social?
In this episode Nick and Erik, fellow youth pastor and youtuber, sit down to discuss better event promotion as a part 2
(Check out Part 1: erikyoutubechannel.com) of this super mashup episode exploring the value of outreach events and how to get the word out.

In this episode we'll explore a better more wholistic social media strategy for 2024 and beyond, as well as how to write better emails and create a culture of invite amongst students in your youth ministry.

Finally, we'll explore how to build out a social media and hybrid strategy for your 2024 youth ministry school year.

Tap in to check it out!

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📓SHOWNOTES
//SHOWNOTES & TRANSCRIPTS
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//START FROM SCRATCH
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👉 STAY CONNECTED WITH NICK
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Website: https://www.hybridministry.xyz

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🕰️TIMECODES
00:00 IDEA #1: Stop Promoting Events on Social Media
04:48 Two Types of Social Promotions
10:38 IDEA #2: Write Better Emails
14:00 IDEA #3: Create an Invite Culture
17:10 A Wholistic Hybrid Approach
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✍️TRANSCRIPT
00;00;00;00 - 00;00;24;21
Nick Clason
Well. Hey, everyone, welcome to the Hybrid Ministry Show. And in this episode we're going to talk about better event promotion as well as a holistic digital and social media approach for your church and your youth ministry. And this is actually part two. Part one is linked right here at the top of the screen over on another channel, because we're doing a massive mash up collab.

00;00;24;28 - 00;00;49;07
Nick Clason
And I am joined today by my friend Erik with the K Erik.

Erik w/a "k" Williams
Good morning bro. How you doing? Good to see you Nick. So excited to be on your channel. Love what you're doing bro. So so good.

Yeah, well if you weren't listening or privy to the conversation that we just clicked stop and now rerecord on, we talked through an entire, like, outreach strategy, right?

00;00;49;08 - 00;01;08;17
Nick Clason
Yeah, well if you weren't listening or privy to the conversation that we just clicked stop and now rerecord on, we talked through an entire, like, outreach strategy, right?
You gave out a bunch of games. You gave out a full run sheet on, like how to do a great outreach style event at your church. And one major piece, right? In all of that, in churches and in youth ministry is promotion. We want people to come to our event. It's natural. It's a human nature, you know what I mean?

00;01;08;20 - 00;01;31;07
Nick Clason
And so one of the ways that we're always trying to get people to come to our event is through social media. Yeah. Is that not a normal like strategies and a normal thought process? Erik, for the average American youth pastor.

Erik w/a "k" Williams
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm totally I've totally used social media to promote events like for a long time. Yeah.

00;01;31;13 - 00;02;03;02
Nick Clason
And is it effective?

Erik w/a "k" Williams
I don't see a lot of likes on those posts. Yeah. And, I don't know, I'm not seeing, sharing and whatever. Yeah, I think I think it's just if, like if you look at in the past, a lot of my social media stuff for youth ministry, it tends to be mostly promotional. Okay. And watching your channel, one of the things I've learned is that's not a great idea because then it's just promotion.

00;02;03;02 - 00;02;25;00
Erik w/a "k" Williams
And it's not like, hey, because I looked at this, I'm going to get 20% off my next event, right? Right. It's just an announcement. Yeah, yeah. And that's what I am trying to steer youth pastors, church communicators away from, because if we're not careful, we're going to view social media as another announcement channel. And it's really not built for that.

00;02;25;00 - 00;02;46;06
Nick Clason
And if you treat it that way, it's not going to be incredibly successful. And so you should still get the word out and you can still use social media. But before you do, I want you to tweak and adjust your strategy on it. And so the first I have three ideas for better event promotion for your event, Erik, that we just talked through.

00;02;46;14 - 00;03;07;00
Nick Clason
The first one is don't post announcements announcing announcing it on social media. And what I mean by that in particular, because I'm going to get a little nuanced here, is I still think you can and should announce it, but don't just post your graphic that you cooked up on Canva or on Instagram Stories or wherever you cooked it up.

00;03;07;00 - 00;03;27;22
Nick Clason
Like, don't just post that because you will probably see as you see, as you said, two, three, six likes on it and likes aren't the only metric, you know, get the word across. Of course, like people will still see it. But you got to think about, our habits. Why do you, Erik, why do you get on social media?

00;03;27;24 - 00;03;48;25
Erik w/a "k" Williams
I want to be entertained, all right? I want to catch up with people, but I want to. I want to be entertained. That's. It's one of the things I love scrolling. Super. Particularly scrolling through videos. Right? Is I want it to be funny. Yeah, yeah. And, if you're watching this live, the month of August, your download youth ministry, I think it's like, God, an up or maybe silver and on up.

00;03;48;27 - 00;04;04;17
Nick Clason
I provided the mystery item for the members, and it was a let's go free e-book on how to crush your social media. And so one of the concepts in there, and if you know you're not a member or you missed the download perk, I'll drop a link in there. You can get it for just a few bucks, down below in the description.

00;04;04;17 - 00;04;27;05
Nick Clason
But one of the stats I included is that reels or short form vertical video TikTok style videos account for get this 90% of the internet's traffic. And so you're right, we get on social media to to be entertained or even to be inspired, maybe learn some stuff, but we don't get on there to catch up on our announcements, to catch up on what's the latest on our church.

00;04;27;05 - 00;04;52;20
Nick Clason
So stop posting static announcement graphics and start posting the types of content that people get on social media for i.e short form vertical based video. If you make it less than 60 seconds, you can post it on any of your social platforms including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and even YouTube shorts. And so if you are going to post about an event, I would recommend two styles of posts.

00;04;52;20 - 00;05;13;29
Erik w/a "k" Williams
So there's one. It's like the cap cut meme. Have you seen this before? The different cap cut style memes? absolutely. Lovely. I'm not. I haven't really gotten into using them yet much. Yeah, but I love I love using that like the, the the one where the guy who is The Mandalorian, I forget his name. Yeah. where he's laughing.

00;05;13;29 - 00;05;32;05
Nick Clason
Yep. Like really hard with that other guy. Like, I love that meme where you, you can put stuff in the background, right? Because it's kind of green screen concept. so, so good. Yeah. So find a way to, to catch the wave of a trending kind of like cap cut meme. And if you don't know, ask one of your teenagers, they'll help you.

00;05;32;08 - 00;05;53;15
Erik w/a "k" Williams
Speaking of speaking of cap cut, like, That's something. Now I use Final Cut to do most of my video editing. Yep. But when I'm doing, stuff with my phone, like, I do, like, screen like words on the screen, all that stuff, I use cap cut all the time. So last year I decided to invest in paying for it's a yearly fee.

00;05;53;18 - 00;06;19;17
Erik w/a "k" Williams
I think it's like 75 bucks. Typically. They almost always have some sort of save a certain percentage off. So I paid 50 bucks last year. I just got a reminder that my subscriptions almost out. So they're giving me a 36%, 34, 36% off of the yearly yearly fee. So grab those, grab those discounts when you can. But for me, it's been a totally worth it expense because I use it all the time.

00;06;19;20 - 00;06;39;27
Nick Clason
Yeah. And and I don't pay for it. My youth, ministry, doesn't pay for it. So I'm still using the free version, and you can still get a lot out of of cap cut, even if you don't want to go that paid for out. So the other one, the other idea I have, and these are like on the rise right now with in churches and stuff, are the like, transition videos.

00;06;39;29 - 00;07;00;07
Nick Clason
and I don't know the other way to, to describe them, but essentially it starts with, a video like, a popular video of some sort. And the one I've seen a lot recently is the guy running away from, like, a bull in the streets. It must be like a running of the bulls thing in Spain or whatever, and he gets speared in the back and so on screen.

00;07;00;07 - 00;07;22;07
Nick Clason
You see, this guy just gets speared right in the back and just fly forward, and then it cuts out to your church or another church and some dude or girl getting, I guess, jumping or thrown into like the row of chairs. And then they like, you know, get up all, like, hurt and then turn around, look at the camera and they invite, you know, invite to church.

00;07;22;07 - 00;07;40;23
Nick Clason
And so there are, you know, a bunch of different ones of those. And I discovered there's so many more than I even thought, because I got on one of my accounts and I started just kind of creating a library of them, sharing them over to my church account. And the more I shared them, the more the algorithm kept feeding me those.

00;07;40;25 - 00;08;04;07
Nick Clason
And so now I've gone around with students and stuff and I'm like, hey, film this, walk into this chair or dive into these. These couches, or, you know, we'll spill one of the other ones. There's like a baby puking on screen and you see all the puke come out and then it like it dive the the milk dumps into the cup and you hear the little splash, and then someone takes a drink of it and it's like there's always free coffee at church.

00;08;04;07 - 00;08;27;02
Erik w/a "k" Williams
Something like that. Like, oh, so gross, so gross, but so funny. And, really, really popular right now. And so that's another way to invite someone to your event, but again, in a way that leans into what social media is built for and made for. Yeah, I love the one where somebody is running and jumping does like a cannonball into into, a pool.

00;08;27;08 - 00;08;53;03
Erik w/a "k" Williams
Yeah. And then the next scene is like sugar cube dropping into a cup and it's like, yeah, like much smaller. Yeah. They're just funny. And again, you can still get the word out, but with like a little tweak. Right, a little adjustment. Don't just post your cooked up Canva graphic but include faces on social media include entertainment and entertainment style elements on social media.

00;08;53;03 - 00;09;10;27
Nick Clason
So that's that's my first kind of point. Do you have anything else to add there before we I just say,

Erik w/a "k" Williams
you know, you just said it in to include faces like students love to see themselves. Yep. I think that's brilliant. The more you can get students in there instead of just you same face over and over, talking head kind of thing all the time.

00;09;10;29 - 00;09;27;21
Erik w/a "k" Williams
I think that's brilliant. I love that dude. Yeah. And in addition to my doing my book, I got one here on my channel as well. It's free. It's down. The show notes. It will lay out this whole, this whole thing. So if you haven't grabbed it yet, go check that out. My site. I just want to support that, by the way, because that's I've downloaded that.

00;09;27;21 - 00;09;54;18
Erik w/a "k" Williams
That's been super, super helpful to me. You give so much inside of that e-book, bro. I absolutely love it. Well I appreciate that. Yeah, absolutely. And I'm sure help churches do better and get the word out that. What's up everyone Nicholas in here hopping into the middle of this episode to say that as I was ending it, I got this idea that I just wanted to give you my top six favorite transition videos and my top six favorite cap cut template.

00;09;54;18 - 00;10;14;10
Nick Clason
So if you hit up the link down below in the description and YouTube, it will give you a word document. it will just, the form will drop it into a drop box for download that word document, and it will give you six links to the Instagram videos, six links to the cap cut videos, as well as websites that you can use.

00;10;14;10 - 00;10;37;22
Nick Clason
Once you post those to either TikTok or to Instagram that you can download directly from that social channel, and then repost it without the tick tock or Instagram Reels watermark. out to Facebook or YouTube or wherever else you want to cross post things. I hope it's helpful to use these in your next event promotion. Without any further ado, back to the rest of them.

00;10;37;23 - 00;10;56;22
Nick Clason
So that's the whole goal of it. Yeah. Speaking. Getting better, getting the word out. write better emails. People like, if you're anything like me or any of the churches I've been in, we've done things like, you know, such and such church weekly student ministry update. And then in that, of course, you're like announcing your back to school event.

00;10;56;22 - 00;11;17;29
Nick Clason
You're announcing your costume party around Halloween time, you're announcing your Friendsgiving event. But nobody, who doesn't if they don't open the email, they don't read that content, they don't see it. And so it misses them. And so a new idea I had, and this is relevant because it just happened to me this week at our church, in our children's ministry.

00;11;18;02 - 00;11;39;00
Nick Clason
They were having an event I didn't know about. And the the subject is, you know, my church's kids ministry update, and I never read them. Guilty. All right, I work there. I'm a dad of kids in the ministry, but I never read them because I figure there's really nothing new in there. But there was something new, but I didn't open it.

00;11;39;02 - 00;11;54;09
Nick Clason
And you can look at it two ways. I'm I'm to blame or they're to blame. And most churches would be like, I'm to blame because they look back at open rates and they see that they're really low and they're like, well, you don't know what's going on because you don't open it. All of that is true. Guilty as charged.

00;11;54;12 - 00;12;30;06
Nick Clason
However, no, this most open rates, like a good open rate for like a business is like in the 20 to 30%. And so if you're a church, yeah, you're probably higher than that. But if you start putting some of what's going on, even in the subject of the email, even if people don't open it, then if their eyes ever glance through their inbox and they ignore your emails, but they still take a glance or a gander over at the subject, they'll at least be aware of what's going on in your in your youth ministry, and so you can prevent your outreach event to your parents and to any of the students who are subscribed to

00;12;30;06 - 00;12;51;22
Erik w/a "k" Williams
your email list with just better subjects and intake in inside of that when they open the email. Because, I mean, I've been guilty of this. I've seen I've been on emails from churches that it feels like I mean, you've got a template which I think is good to have a template. So you have to keep recreating something every single week.

00;12;51;24 - 00;13;15;06
Nick Clason
But it sometimes it can feel like I've seen all this information every single week. so I don't even bother opening. Yeah. Anything you could do to to kind of freshen inside of the email. Yeah. I mean, and you don't want to get clickbaity or sensational, right. But the more interesting your subject is, the the the more prone people are to open it.

00;13;15;09 - 00;13;33;08
Nick Clason
Keep in mind, too, that people want to people want to just like, social media. They want to interact with people. So if they're getting it from your ministry, like they they may be a bot in parent or student that wants to know what's going on in your ministry, but that's not enticing to them to correspond with the brand of your ministry.

00;13;33;11 - 00;13;52;19
Nick Clason
So send it from your name. Send it from your senior pastor's name. Like those types of things, you will see an uptick in engagement in that way. If it feels personal, like they're getting an email from a person as opposed to getting an email from an organization. So. Good. Yeah. the third thing, and I don't want to belabor it because we did we hit it in your episode.

00;13;52;19 - 00;14;15;24
Nick Clason
So go check that out. But really, I think the key to getting more people to your event, beyond just promoting it on social media, is really like creating a culture of invite, where students from your church will invite their friends to your church and you got to build that culture and over time it's going to take time. So if you're brand new, like just keep working it, keep working the soil, keep doing the thing.

00;14;15;27 - 00;14;36;05
Nick Clason
Create a safe space that your students know they can trust you. If they bring a friend to an event, you're not going to do something weird on them, and you got to do that a few times to prove it, to prove to your students that you're going to do that. But then eventually they'll start to realize that, like, oh, this is going to be a safe place and a safe event for me to bring my friend to.

00;14;36;07 - 00;14;57;26
Nick Clason
And they will start bringing students. And you know how it is like a word of mouth invite is so much more valuable than, static graphic that they scroll across on social media. Yeah, I think I think so. I mean, if you're if you run lame events, that word is going to get out to a. Right. So you want it's got to be a good event and that invite culture.

00;14;57;26 - 00;15;24;00
Erik w/a "k" Williams
I think is an interesting conversation. And I just want to say a real quick thing about it. Nick. Yeah, is I remember when I came to a church and, we had this annual event that had been happening for a long time, and, the high schoolers were coming because it's really, like, competitive. experience. So there was there was like, students were showing up no matter what.

00;15;24;03 - 00;15;58;19
Erik w/a "k" Williams
But the middle schoolers, we hardly had any middle schoolers that were showing up. And so we talked about that, like, why is that? But there wasn't a there wasn't a culture of invitation. So we at that, that meant we had to do groundwork within the youth ministry to go, okay, there's an importance for our students that come regularly to understand they they need to be inviting their friends, because this is an easy, open opportunity for them to be able to share their faith with their friends by letting somebody else kind of set the groundwork for it.

00;15;58;19 - 00;16;14;06
Erik w/a "k" Williams
They show up to something fun. Then they have this conversation, then in the car ride home or whatever. Hey, I know we had a lot of fun with some highlights, but but it was so fun. Were telling your parents whatever, but what was something that you heard the the youth pastor talk about this? What did you think about that.

00;16;14;09 - 00;16;39;09
Erik w/a "k" Williams
Yeah. And then having that conversation. So setting them up for success, if you will, rather than just show up and and do it and then don't ever talk about it again. Yeah. Yeah. 100%. And that's, that's just going to take time. And if students are not bringing their friends to events, then maybe ask them why they're not and be prepared for the gut check of their honesty.

00;16;39;11 - 00;16;57;16
Nick Clason
yeah. But they'll be if they're honest with you. That is just absolutely good information that you have to, like, grab Ahold of, take to the bank, and then try and figure out what you need to do to create more of a culture of invite. So, so good. Well, here's the thing, Erik. Right. So like, we just we promoted this event.

00;16;57;16 - 00;17;20;20
Nick Clason
We did a few like fun Instagram Reels. We did a few different like, emails. And we got students inviting students. But my my recommendation is more than just like a blitz. Like a marketing blitz on your social media for your upcoming Back to School bash, your upcoming Halloween party, your upcoming fill in the blank whatever event. Like you should be doing this on a holistic strategy, you know?

00;17;20;20 - 00;17;40;09
Nick Clason
And in the book that I referenced earlier, I lay out a very detailed and very like high level strategy, like it's it's a high bar and it's often and it's like a full time job. But recently episode 106, I'll link it down below in the show notes. I scaled it back and that's what I also put in, like my doing my book as well.

00;17;40;09 - 00;18;08;03
Erik w/a "k" Williams
And I said, hey, listen, if you're just getting going like focus on three times a week and I think three times a week is much more attainable for youth pastors. And I would guess, and I love you to speak into this. Like, I would guess that most youth pastors can look around and see other social media accounts are doing well and want to do that, but are just thinking, bro, I don't have the time.

00;18;08;06 - 00;18;24;04
Nick Clason
And I would imagine that that's the boat that most youth pastors are and would. Would you agree with that or disagree with. Absolutely. I, I think of that for just myself. Like if I'm going, man, five days a week, I mean, there's so much to do. Three days a week feels a little more a little more comfortable. Yeah.

00;18;24;05 - 00;18;44;27
Erik w/a "k" Williams
I'm a big fan of like batch recording where you just I'm just going to take an hour on Monday and I'm going to record these three videos. Yeah. And then take the time. I mean, it does take time, right? But like some of those cap cup meme videos, that's not that's not much time at all. You're just kind of putting that information in and taking something that's already been used.

00;18;44;27 - 00;19;06;24
Erik w/a "k" Williams
And on the green screen you drop your information and like that's that's more simple. But I love I mean, dude, you're crushing it with how you do it with your youth ministry. I love like the, the, drafting videos and the seven seven questions to try to figure out what is it? I'm thinking of those those kind of things I think are so brilliant.

00;19;06;26 - 00;19;28;21
Erik w/a "k" Williams
It takes some time, but if you batch it, record it, do it all in one day, like I know on Instagram you can schedule videos to, to, to, to, yeah to go at specific times and dates and all that stuff. Yeah. So it takes time. But I think it's important and there has to be a, a belief in the value of it, for you to actually do it.

00;19;28;24 - 00;19;52;20
Erik w/a "k" Williams
You're not going to see the return on your investment overnight. Yeah. That's a, that's again another time. Just like the invite culture. It's going to take time to build your channel and students getting on it. Yeah. But you get those students involved with it both on screen and owning the the shooting of the videos and editing. Because there's you're going to find students that are that like to do that even if they're decent.

00;19;52;22 - 00;20;17;27
Nick Clason
Yeah. You can do some training with them. Yep. Give somebody some responsibility and go, hey, I want you to take on one of these a week or whatever. Yeah, that's on it. That's exactly right. And that's exactly what we've done. So I got it up and going all by myself. Proof of concept, sustainability, all these things. But now I've started recruiting other students, you know, and to your point, we just batch record.

00;20;17;27 - 00;20;37;00
Nick Clason
So anytime it's a Wednesday night we'll we have a four week strategy now. So one week we'll do those draft style videos. If you're watching here on YouTube you can see some examples. and we'll film as many of those as we can with as many students as we can. So I like to walk out of the night with anywhere from 4 to 6 of these different style of videos.

00;20;37;03 - 00;20;55;12
Nick Clason
Then the next week we'll do our seven question style video and same kind of concept as many students as we can. As many as we have time for will knock them out and, you know, get 4 to 6 in the hopper to edit later. we'll do the next week. I do like a man on the street style of walking out the microphone, interviewing kids or whatever.

00;20;55;12 - 00;21;10;29
Nick Clason
And so that's getting out of our room that we film in and more like on the streets. You can kind of see what our youth ministry looks like and everything. And then the last one is we'll just walk around, we'll do this. Those transition style invite videos. So hey, this week we'll do the one where the kids getting rammed by a ball.

00;21;10;29 - 00;21;29;23
Nick Clason
Next week we'll do the one with the the baby puking or whatever. And you do a few of those. You get. We got, last night, two nights ago, we got six of them, you know, in the hopper. And so. And I'm not doing that like, I got it set up. I got all the infrastructure built, but now I've handed it off to one of my students.

00;21;29;23 - 00;21;50;17
Erik w/a "k" Williams
And so he's doing it while I'm running the youth ministry program out playing basketball on the courts. And he's somewhere else in the building filming these these videos and that. Then the night he hands me the camera, I pop out the SD card and we're off. We're off to the races. And the good news in all of that, right, is that you can train up students and they want to help with.

00;21;50;17 - 00;22;09;18
Nick Clason
And when we look at it like the growing Young Study and Fuller Institute and all these things like keychain leadership is the key to sustained faith. So it shouldn't just be you as a youth pastor, like cooking all these things up, like bring about your leaders, bring about your volunteers, and and bring about your students, man. Like they want to help.

00;22;09;18 - 00;22;28;25
Erik w/a "k" Williams
So let an A side side bonus on that. You start handing some of the stuff off to students. They some of them are going to get like an excitement for doing that. And it could build into something even more. I had a student who I taught him how to do some PowerPoint stuff this like early on, and then I showed him how to shoot and edit video.

00;22;28;26 - 00;22;53;02
Erik w/a "k" Williams
Yeah, he went into marketing as a business. Yeah. Like all because he learned that stuff in youth group in middle school. Yeah. And the principles transferable beyond just social media, right. Like you might get kids are not interested in that, but they're interested in other things and isn't our job, as the apostle Paul puts it, to train the saints and equip them for works and acts of service.

00;22;53;02 - 00;23;10;21
Nick Clason
It's not our job to do all the works and acts of service. And so in the same vein, while social media feels like this maybe foreign kind of concept punch fear in the face just get started. And like I said, link down below. Episode 106. I'll detail an outline how to do all of that and just get those steps taken.

00;23;10;25 - 00;23;32;22
Nick Clason
Love it. Anything else? Erik, before we wrap this week up,

Erik w/a "k" Williams
I just say on the social media world, just just make a decision to do it. Like John, John Acuff is a guy I love to read and listen to. He talks about the hardest part about running is putting your shoes on. Once you put your shoes on, you're committed.

00;23;32;25 - 00;23;53;11
Erik w/a "k" Williams
Actually, when he's going to run in the morning, he puts his whole running outfit on the floor the night before. And then when you put your shoes on, that means you're going to actually run. So I'd say pick up your phone and, you know, sketch a few ideas and then go actually do it. Yeah. And then you start getting into a rhythm and it becomes a lot easier once you get into a rhythm of it.

00;23;53;18 - 00;24;12;06
Nick Clason
Yeah, that's 100% right. Well hey everyone, so glad that you made it all the way to the end. if you haven't, go check out part one. Erik's got a bunch of freebies there. And youth ministry, you're definitely going to want those. Those are premium level freebies. But until next time, and as always, stay hybrid. See you.

https://hybrid-ministry-40060036.hubspotpagebuilder.com/free-hybrid-ministry-e-book

======================================
DESCRIPTION
🏅Travel Sports and Youth Group. They have been the bain of youth pastor’s existence for years.
🗓️What if they don’t have to be the enemy?
🥱What about Youth Group Kids who exhibit complacency?
======================================
📓SHOWNOTES
//SHOWNOTES & TRANSCRIPTS
http://www.hybridministry.xyz/087

//YOUTUBE VIDEO
https://youtu.be/HV6V1GbWEvU

//FREE EBOOK STRATEGY GUIDE
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YOUR MESSAGES ARE BORING
//https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqOPjD5hN-g&t=8s

STOP IGNORING SOCIAL MEDIA
//https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slB0Rmf_X0c&t=390s

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======================================
🛠️TOOLS
Some of the below links are affilate links in which we do recieve a small commission based on your purchase or use of products

//BEST DYM RESOURCES
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OPUS.PRO FOR AI SHORTS & REELS
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//YOUTUBE STARTER KIT FOR UNDER $100
https://www.hybridministry.xyz/articles/youtubestarterkit

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TRY REV.COM FOR TRANSCRIBING
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--------------
🕰️TIMECODES
00:00 The Two Biggest Enemies to your Youth Ministry
01:46 Extra Curriculuars are Killing my Attendance
05:15 Complancey is also killing my youth group
08:04 The Suprising Solution to Youth Sports and Complacency in your Youth Group

TRANSCRIPT
00;00;00;00 - 00;00;32;17
Nick Clason
The two biggest enemies in youth ministry are extracurricular activities and the complacent attitude of your students. Tell me if you've heard this before. Tuesday night is karate so that kid can't come on Tuesdays. If that's when you had youth group and then Wednesday nights is when you have show choir. Thursday night, that same kid also has karate. And of course, you can't do Friday night because that's when the football games are like if you've been in that position.

00;00;32;22 - 00;00;53;10
Nick Clason
Give me a subscribe. If you've had to navigate when you meet for youth night and turn the bell on for good measure because we're starting a brand new playlist exploring all the different issues of youth ministry, and one of them is scheduling. Like how do you schedule around students and their extracurricular activities? What in the world should we meet?

00;00;53;15 - 00;01;17;43
Nick Clason
They're so busy and it almost makes it feel like extracurricular travel, sports, school sports are the enemy. And here’s the fact even when they do show up in the room, you might be so boring that they're not really willing to make your thing a priority. In fact, we have a video right here where we explore all of that and how you can make your youth ministry one of belonging and purpose and serving.

00;01;17;50 - 00;01;43;18
Nick Clason
But I just had a student the other day say, Hey, listen, I just got so much going on. Sometimes student ministry, it just it doesn't make the cut. And unashamedly that was a text that they sent. And so if the two biggest enemies are travel sports and complacency, I want to challenge you to stick around to the very end of this video because I have a solution for each of those two things extracurriculars and complacency.

00;01;43;33 - 00;02;11;00
Nick Clason
Welcome to the High Road Ministry show The Year was 2012 brand new youth Pastor right here. And there were literally three students in my student ministry starting out, one by the name of Brandon, who didn't last very long, one by the name of Megan and then one by the name of Sabrina and Megan and all her friends. And she brought a lot of her friends to youth group.

00;02;11;00 - 00;02;31;58
Nick Clason
So this kind of mattered because she could bring two or three or four different friends with her to youth group. They had show choir and met every single Wednesday night. And so that made Wednesday nights a really tricky night to do youth ministry. But Brandon, the only other boy in the youth ministry, had Tuesday night and Thursday night karate.

00;02;32;03 - 00;02;58;34
Nick Clason
And then of course, Friday nights are like the football game. Like for most towns USA, that's when the high school team is playing its football game. So that really left us with Monday night as an option, which for I can't remember why, but for whatever reason it really wasn't an option. And so I had no idea like what am I supposed to do in to, to make matters worse, I had three kids, so if I choose Wednesday, I lose Megan and all her friends.

00;02;58;34 - 00;03;21;41
Nick Clason
If I choose to, their Thursday, I lose Brandon over to karate. And then the group of three, that's 33% of my students. So like, when am I supposed to plan to do this? I had another student one year who missed summer camp due to a baseball tournament. And then I remember he came up to me after we got back.

00;03;21;41 - 00;03;41;49
Nick Clason
His brother went and all his friends went and so he was at the recap of camp and we shared the recap video and all the students had all their energy and and his tournament had gotten rained out while we were gone. And he came up to me and he said, Next year I'm going to camp no matter what you see.

00;03;41;49 - 00;04;08;43
Nick Clason
Here's what happens once you create some sort of an environment where a student actually wants to be a part and actually wants to belong, it can be a game changer. But the fact of the matter is, especially when you're just getting started out, what do you do when they don't even know you in their thing, their show choir, their karate, their baseball, their basketball, their football, their you fill in the blank, whatever it is.

00;04;08;48 - 00;04;31;46
Nick Clason
What happens when that thing is actually providing more of a place of belonging and more of a place of community than your church? It makes it difficult and honestly, you want to compete with it. You want it to be you want church, you want youth group to be providing more of a place of belonging, more of a place of community.

00;04;31;51 - 00;04;55;39
Nick Clason
But in the life of that student, let's be honest, it really isn't. It's not really providing a place of belonging more than their sport. And so one of the challenges is you are trying to compete with something that is like family to them and you want them to come to something that's already a probably not feeling a little bit like family to them.

00;04;55;44 - 00;05;22;28
Nick Clason
And then B is adding another thing onto their already busy plate of calendaring and activities and things that they have to be committed to doing. And so what do we do about youth sports? Listen, I got an idea. Just hang on. What do you do about complacency? Like you've been there, right, where you have kids, Church kids, non church kids, whatever the case might be.

00;05;22;28 - 00;05;41;52
Nick Clason
And they really like they don't want to be there like you. Like the archetype of student I'm thinking of is the junior in high school comes to youth group hood on air pods in back row. They're just not interested. Like you get up, you got a game, They don't care about the game. You get up, you got a cute video.

00;05;41;52 - 00;06;01;46
Nick Clason
They don't care about the cute video. You see them saying like, how do you reach that kid? And in most cases, that kid is his heart's definitely not in to youth group. And there's a lot of factors for that, one of which might be his level or feeling of belonging. And it doesn't have to just be a him.

00;06;01;46 - 00;06;25;02
Nick Clason
It could be her, right? But we're we're using a certain archetype, and so we'll just keep using that junior boy student with the AirPods in as an example. But nothing's changing. Like just because you have a game, just because you have a cool message, just because you have clever announcements, none of those things are reaching them because he's complacent.

00;06;25;02 - 00;06;55;47
Nick Clason
He's he's not or she's not into whatever you have doing. They're honestly they're being forced to be at church. And here's the thing. That is a really tough pill for us to swallow. Sometimes as youth pastors, is students physical attendance in the room Does not equal an our authentic heart level buy in of what's going on, not only in youth group, but frankly, in faith as it pertains to their relationship with God.

00;06;55;52 - 00;07;17;22
Nick Clason
Because you don't want to just go after their physical attendance, you know what I'm saying? Their physical attendance is not the goal, only their heart being bought into it. Their heart being bought into it is the goal. And so you might be asking, Well, how do I chaste their heart? That's a great question. And in a lot of cases you don't.

00;07;17;27 - 00;07;45;09
Nick Clason
That's the Holy Spirit's role in their life. So you can pray for them and you can try to program creatively in such a way that that they find that and you can try to develop a type of community that's authentic and real and raw that most Gen Z, most Gen Alpha students are actually looking for and that community can take root and that student's life so that they belong to their group before they really truly start to exhibit elements of belief.

00;07;45;14 - 00;08;13;59
Nick Clason
But you can't change their heart. You know that that's the Holy Spirit shop. But just like travel sports and now with an attitude of complacency or just a bad attitude in general, I do have two ideas that I think can change the game in both of those arenas, and we're going to hit that in the next section. So my idea for travel sports and my idea for a complacent attitude is actually one in the same.

00;08;14;04 - 00;08;45;58
Nick Clason
And the idea, of course, is to try to go hybrid. Now, listen, you're like, dude, you're the hybrid ministry podcast. Of course you're thinking that. And yeah, I am. But I have detailed an outline for you in my 100% completely free e-book. It's basically my Nick Clason and the church I'm at now Strategy Guide for Social Media. And it's twofold and the two fold, they actually hit both of the things that we're trying to talk about.

00;08;45;58 - 00;09;12;05
Nick Clason
So the first fold of it is pre film your talks in what pre filming your talks does not only gives you some practice and some opportunity to kind of get ahead of your calendar so that you're not giving up live whenever you're preaching on a Wednesday or Sunday night and looking at your notes for the first time, you've had an opportunity to do it, to deliver it direct to camera, very much like I'm doing right here in this setting, but too, especially for the busy kids.

00;09;12;10 - 00;09;34;24
Nick Clason
It allows them, if they're truly interested in church, to to to consume the message that you've given to them. I know in my show choir example and karate example from the beginning that Brandon I don't really know because he didn't last very long. His family left the church not too long later. But Megan, like her and her family, like they were committed.

00;09;34;29 - 00;09;59;26
Nick Clason
And if I couldn't have offered youth group for them, I know that she would have at least went back and watched the messages because that was something that she was interested in. And so a hybrid approach can actually help the busy kids who can't make it on a Sunday, on a Wednesday, on a Thursday, on a Tuesday, on a whatever day of the week, you end up deciding they can still listen to the message and word of God directly from you, from your mouth, from their youth pastor.

00;09;59;31 - 00;10;35;38
Nick Clason
And you can pre film those messages and post those to YouTube. Now you might be thinking like, Yeah, but, but that doesn't really do much for me, especially by way of the kid who's complacent and doesn't really want anything to do with it. And you know, where I would say with that is the other approach to that is when you pre film your messages, it not only gives you some short form message based clipped content that you can post and use and sprinkle in an all throughout your social media, but it also can let you kind of do another set of social media, which is add more of an element of fun.

00;10;35;43 - 00;10;59;21
Nick Clason
And when you add more of an element of fun, you can go after that student's heart and again, still, that's the Holy Spirit's job. But what if the reason that they're not interested is just because you youth ministry is boring? And so one of the things that we'll do in our student ministry is we’ll film some fun, quirky, silly, entertainment based content as a staff, as a student ministry team.

00;10;59;25 - 00;11;24;40
Nick Clason
But then other times we will challenge ourselves to do some sort of social media challenge where we'll will invite students to be on camera with us. And so that will give them an opportunity to engage and interact. And then when we've invited them onto camera with us, they'll have an opportunity. Now to see themselves later on social media throughout the week.

00;11;24;45 - 00;11;47;00
Nick Clason
And so you can take your long form message content and that can solve the the problem for travel sports. And then you can clip those up into shorts and push people who discover them to watch a YouTube video. And then you can also film some silly content to be discovered by your algorithm and to to engage with the complacent student, the junior with the hood on in the back of the room.

00;11;47;05 - 00;12;14;20
Nick Clason
And you can even films from that content with him and post it. And if you take my strategy fully laid out right here on screen, link down below in the show notes, I will detail for you all of how to do that. And I hope that if you go hybrid, it helps of your extracurricular activities and it also helps of your student ministry, complacency, activities and actually, I have detailed for you the entire strategy in the video that's linked right here on the screen.

00;12;14;25 - 00;12;32;31
Nick Clason
So go ahead, take a look at that. Stop posting announcements to social media. Be better, level it up. You can do it because we're trying to make digital discipleship easy, possible and accessible. So, as always, don't forget stay hybrid.

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📹 Adobe Premiere Pro Presets for Animating Layers
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========================================
DESCRIPTION
👋Welcome to the Hybrid Ministry Show! In this video, we are thrilled to introduce you to the ultimate solution for creating viral reels and shorts with just one click for churches and youth ministries.

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📹 "Adobe Premiere Pro Presets for Animating Layers"
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========================================
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📓SHOWNOTES
//SHOWNOTES & TRANSCRIPTS
http://www.hybridministry.xyz/068

//ADOBE EDITING TUTORIAL
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLngXlSr64YaKVpQBDSQV6Q9hFeXCptHSu

//CAPCUT

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🕰️TIMECODES
00:00-02:26 Church & Social Media are Changing
02:26-04:10 The Ultimate Done for You Resource
04:10-10:18The Best Youth Ministry Strategy for Churches
10:18-21:01 Viral Reel, TikTok and Shorts Strategy for Youth Pastors

21:01-25:55 3 Video Editing Solutions: The 3rd One will Blow your Mind!

✍️TRANSCRIPT
Try Transcribing for Yourself at Rev.Com
rev.pxf.io/R5nDOa

Nick Clason (00:00):
Social media and the church is changing. Maybe it's even changed all the way with Gen Z and Gen Alpha using their phones greater than any other screen-based device combined. Churches are adapting and they should, that's not a bad thing. They're looking for ways to reach the next generation. And I see all kinds of programs out there offering for you as a youth pastor or church leader done for you. Social media resources, heck, I even have one. But what I think is the difference and what I think is really important is that mine is custom. Mine puts you in front of your students, puts you on camera and lets, it allows you to be the face and the voice and not just a bunch of static standard and irrelevant graphics. Because I think a lot of times we allow our social media to just be an additional announcement portal.

Nick Clason (01:01):
It's an extension of our website or it's almost like an email newsletter. Hey, don't forget about this, don't forget about that. But it is changing. All of that is changing because we are in this digital moment. Because here's the thing, you can now reach teenagers and the students that God is already entrusted and placed in your church or in your ministry with the message of hope of the gospel of Jesus and to help them understand and come to a full robust relationship with him. And so the way you might be asking which social media is changing, social media has switched from event-based or post based or who you're following, algorithm to discovery-based algorithm ushered in by TikTok during the pandemic with short form, vertical based video. The algorithm has switched into one that is focused on discoverability. And so in this three part video, I'm going to walk through not only the strategy that you should have for your church social media, but in addition to that, the viral short form video framework for reels, YouTube shorts tos, and finally editing, which is often the hardest part. So make sure that you stick around to the end of the video because I have an editing solution that can take this and take your entire strategy and make it happen in one click too. Good to be true. Let's find out.

Nick Clason (02:27):
Well, hey everyone, my name is Nick Clason. I am the host of the Hybrid Ministry Show located as a youth pastor in Dallas Fort Worth the D F W area, but I have been in youth ministry across five different locations, primarily in the Midwest now here in the south for over 12 years, going on 13 years here soon. And I'm on a mission to help churches embrace digital, not as a replacement for the in-person moment, but to realize that digital and hybrid ministry is a relevant and real option to help reach students and also help disciple the students that God has entrusted into your care. In fact, as I mentioned earlier, I have a resource 40 free done for you resources, and I want to have you check that out because it is a turnkey P D F ebook that you can just take and turn and start to implement.

Nick Clason (03:16):
It has ideas and resources and video options that you can recycle week in and week out, whether you have a full team of students, staff, or whether you are a volunteer youth worker and you want to pull in some other volunteers or some students to help you accomplish this mission. And guess what the good news is, almost all of it can be done completely on your phone. Click the link down in the show notes to grab your copy of it. And hey, I also want to let you know that as we're about to dive into this video, likes are free and subscribed are even less of a barrier to entry. And both of those things would be incredibly helpful, not only to me, I really do appreciate it, but also to help us get this message out there to others who need to hear it and who are also in the trenches just like you and just like me trying to fight through and figure out this digital media stuff together.

Nick Clason (04:10):
All right, so social media strategy. My social media strategy is to film your messages ahead of time. Now what do I mean by that? So if you're anything like me, you get a curriculum or you plan out your messages and every single Wednesday night or maybe Sunday night or maybe even Sunday morning as well, you are teaching some sort of content. Now in my context, we meet two times a week. We meet Wednesday nights and then we meet Sunday morning for group-based discussion. And so on Wednesday night we introduce the topic and that's where we have our more traditional kind of message type of thing. And then on Sunday morning, we dive a little bit deeper into that concept and that content, and that's where the students discuss it in a small group connect group type of format. So the Wednesday night message is the main and primary message for the week.

Nick Clason (05:01):
And so what we do is we deliver that message live and in the room. Now, COVID I d had all of us doing some sort of digital or hybrid version. Most churches in America were able to upgrade their livestream capabilities. They have a better board, they have good cameras in the back of the room now to be able to capture their pastor's sermons. And if that upgrade happened in your context than what I want to recommend is that you capture your messages right then and there if it is good enough. Now, if you're like me and I'm at a pretty big church, but even still our student space does not have the tools that it takes to capture a video live, not for even livestream purposes, but even just capture the teaching concept. So what we've decided to do as a team is to sit down very similar to what I'm doing right now on this video and look direct to camera and deliver the message.

Nick Clason (05:59):
We use a teleprompter. We've built out a full studio one day. I'm going to share that all with you, how we do all of that, but essentially script out our message, deliver it direct to camera, and then we edit it and post it to YouTube. Now, you might be thinking, I don't have any editing abilities. No problem. We have a complete crash course playlist, Adobe Premier Pro and Adobe Photoshop to help get you up to speed on that if that's something that you're interested in or just simply capture it and do some minimal and basic editing and something like iMovie or Cap Cut or Windows movie maker that you already have installed on your device or pass it off to a student who likes doing this because they're good at it as well. But so that's my recommended strategy. In addition, there's all kinds of other social media type stuff, but the bedrock, the framework, the thing that you can derive all of your other social media content off of is your weekly message.

Nick Clason (06:58):
Now, if in your context you deliver two teachings or you have multiple different teaching type of settings, just pick the one that's your most basic sort of student ministry sermon so to speak, and maybe consider finding a way to tie your different environments together so that you're not in one curriculum on Wednesday and one curriculum on Sunday. Odds are even if you are in that sort of setting, one is a little bit more deep and one is a little bit more for your wider audience, I would say pick your wider audience. One, you can post that on YouTube and you can even start to explore and get a little bit better at keyword, ss, e o, search, all those types of things. And that's going to help you get that message of hope out to the people that are on YouTube watching and looking for messages.

Nick Clason (07:44):
So with that strategy in mind, and again, I detail and outline all of this in my ebook, if you want to know what I do for our social strategy, which does include direct to camera messages, you can grab that link in the show notes, like I said, but I also want to let you know this is that the other advantage of pre delivering it is that by the time I actually get to the moment where I'm going to deliver the message live in the room, everything's done, graphics for it are done. I've already prepped and practiced for it. And so to get up there and deliver it is a breeze at that point. Prior to that, putting all the work in, writing it, fully, transcribing it so that I can put it on teleprompter and read it while it's going in front of me, that's a lot of extra work, but by the time I'm ready to deliver it, I am done.

Nick Clason (08:32):
So it helps you even get a little bit ahead in your student ministry rhythm, and it also helps give you something really, really beneficial and useful for social media based content. Now, here's the other thing you might be thinking like isn't a YouTube video, isn't it supposed to be a little bit shorter? Yeah, YouTube videos work best between 10 and 15 minutes or right in that range. There's all kinds of different and analytics that people have gone into to parse that out. But just take my word for it, 10 to 15 minutes. And in the room we teach longer. We're like 20, 25 minutes or so. We include some more elements where they kind of turn and talk and maybe when I do a turn and talk type of moment live in the room when I'm doing on YouTube, I'll say something like, Hey, calm it down in the section below.

Nick Clason (09:16):
So I'm tweaking it and optimizing it to be for social, to be for YouTube. So I'm using things like in this video series as opposed to in this teaching series. So I'm tweaking and adjusting my language and even my approach just ever so slightly to be optimized for an online audience. However, I'm still delivering the same biblical content, the same outline, and the same message and motive sort of from scripture. So that's going to help you if you are willing to adopt, if you're willing to put the work in. And I recommend that you do and listen. Maybe you're like, Hey, I don't know. I don't have the time. I really don't think I can get to it. What if you tried it for just one series? See what one series did, and it's going to take some time. I know you're going to have to look ahead on your calendar and budget for it, but if you do, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at the benefits that it's not only going to give you, but that it's also going to add to your hybrid experience.

Nick Clason (10:12):
But let's move on and let's talk about what we do after we pre film our messages. So after we pre film our messages, now we're going to clip those messages up into small short form reels, TikTok, shorts, content. Now, you might be thinking, I'm not on any of those platforms. Odds are you are on Instagram and if you're on Instagram, yes, Instagram has the feed, but they also have stories across the top and then over to the right of the search bar at the bottom or the action at the search bar button. The ad content button is the reels section. And reels are huge on Instagram right now. In fact, the c e O of Instagram. So we're no longer just a photo sharing app. Short form, vertical based video is king on social media. So whether even if you don't have an active TikTok account or a TikTok account at all, you can post directly to reels and maybe you don't have a YouTube account set up yet.

Nick Clason (11:09):
If you're going to pre film your messages, I recommend that you post those to YouTube. And YouTube also now has a functionality with short form, vertical based video called shorts. And so you can post shorts and reels and you can duplicate that strategy and have enough content for both of those things posting identical content on both of those platforms. And if you do have a TikTok, great boom, just add that in as well and post a TikTok post to Instagram, post to shorts, and hey, even if you want to cater to the old people post on Facebook as well, and you can do all four of those by using the exact same piece of content. Again, I outline that in my 40 done for you resources. But that being said, the bedrock of that foundation is going to be your teaching strategies. So I post three teaching videos per week.

Nick Clason (11:56):
You can make it five, you can make it eight. I'm going to tell you how you're going to be able to do that here in just a minute. But you can do a few reels from your teaching content depending on how many you do, depending on your flow, your outline or whatever. And then just fill in the gaps with some other things. So you can do Wednesday night, Sunday morning recaps by just getting two to five second videos, stitching them together using the auto cut feature directly in TikTok using Cap Cut. You can do an Instagram, you can do a YouTube, whatever the editor of your choice is, if you haven't started exploring them, open 'em up, give 'em a shot, add some music to it, and boom, you're done. And then once you post it in one of those, simply search for a TikTok downloader without watermark on your browser.

Nick Clason (12:43):
Paste the link in there, download it, go post it to Instagram reels. Go post it to YouTube shorts. If you did it in Instagram, search for a reels downloader without watermark. If you did it in shorts, search for a shorts downloader without watermark and then post it in the other two or three places that you're going to be using it. So the 40 done for you resources, I outline all of that. Again, link in the description, go grab that. But I'm going to tell you how you can get those shorts in one click, literally one click if you sit down and if you pre-fill your messages, then there are resources out there now, especially AI powered that can help deliver for you, done for you and take away some of the editing headache that we're going to have. And so what you need to know is that while we're doing these reels, I want to help show for you right here right now, the viral framework. Okay? So there's kind of like five different things that are important when it comes to a viral reel. So you got to think on social media. What you're always trying to do is you're always trying to get people's attention, so you got to be mastering the stop the scroll. That's the goal is you got to get people to stop swiping through because they're swiping through at a quick rate. They're deciding in one second or less if your video is worth it. So if you take a big breath,

Nick Clason (14:07):
Hey everyone,

Nick Clason (14:08):
Boom, they're scrolling past that. You got to dive right into the video and just editing can take care of that. You can take your big breath in the room, you can take your big breath as you deliver on camera, Hey everyone, but clip right there to the hey everyone. Or better yet not. Hey everyone. Tonight we're going to talk about does God really love me? Why don't you just go to, does God really love me? You see how that's a much better stop the scroll, a much better hook. The other thing is if you are clipping little snippets and segments out of a full 10, 15, 20 minute long form video, you're going to be dropping people into the middle of a video that already has context around it. So create a moment for context on the screen, fly in a text that says that gives them context for what you're talking about, discovering God's ridiculous love for people, unleashing the power of the Holy Spirit in your life, helping make an impact in your life, becoming liked and loved by those around you.

Nick Clason (15:07):
You know what I'm saying? Having that in there so that that's going to peak interest and curiosity. And then as you're actual talking to the camera, that context is there just literally on screen. You can go right over your head. You can go right down here. I mean, if you're watching this on shorts right now, you're probably seeing texts kind of all over the place that's going to help the viewer know what's going on. You're going to help them understand the context of the message and where you were, and then now where you're going to be taking them. The other thing, the must do thing on social media right now, especially short form, vertical based video, if you ignore all the other things I'm telling you, do this thing, caption your video. Captions are amazing. Everything now on TikTok, Instagram reels and YouTube shorts, all the text both in the captions, like the actual captions of the post, as well as the text captions on the screen, all of that is being indexed in search for search engine optimization so that the people that can search things, they may stumble across your video if you have the captions on screen.

Nick Clason (16:16):
There's also a wide percentage of people who are in positions sometimes where they are watching reels without sound. If you don't have captions, you miss out on that entire audience of people who are trying to watch it. Imagine if a teenager opens up their phone to watch you at school, but you don't have captions on it. Boom, they're going to keep moving if you do, you least give them that option. Now, do I recommend that teenagers watch reels and shorts on their phone at school? No, not at all. But I do recommend that you include captions on your videos. The other couple of things is number four, a relevant hook, something that's going to keep them. Again, remember they're making that decision in a second two seconds on short form, vertical based video. So try and script out craft out a good hook. Again, if you're clipping this from a message, you may have to find ways to add hook type things in your message as you're going that don't seem awkward and clunky, but that you're weaving in naturally.

Nick Clason (17:12):
But then you can go and find those spots and boom, clip, clip, clip, clip, clip, and then create this framework for viral short form, vertical based video. And finally, if you have the ability, if you can edit sound effects, those things change the game. If people aren't paying attention, plop all kinds of different things where things are flying on the screen, the sound effects help drive people's attention back to the screen. Back to the screen. I want to give you an example. The other day I was watching a video that I had just edited. It's one of my favorite frameworks that we do. I detail and outline it in my 40 done for you. It's called Drafts, okay? And so what we'll do is we'll just draft anything. So I might be like, Hey, let's draft Avengers. And so me and another person will just go back and forth, and so my first pick obviously would be Thor, who would your first pick be?

Nick Clason (18:03):
Let me know in the comments down below. And then that person, you probably pick like Spider-Man or something. It's like, okay, great. I'm going to go back. I'm going to pick Captain America now. Who's your second pick? Now, let me know in the comments below. You probably like, I don't know, black Widow. Great, that's fine. She doesn't have any superpowers, but she's amazing. My third pick is going to be the Hulk, who's your third pick going to be probably Drax from Guardian to the Galaxy. That makes sense. He's hilarious, but I wouldn't pick him. Now I'm going to add Iron Man, because you left him off for so long and you're like, okay, great. I'll take Wanda Max off. She's super powerful. That's great. I'll take her husband vision, who's dead in Wanda Visions, and he's also super powerful. And you're like, okay, I will take the og.

Nick Clason (18:44):
I can't even think of one right now. Maybe you'll take a rocket from Guardian to the Galaxy and you got your team. I got my team now whose team's better? Let us know in the comments down below, you do that live with the person. You have commentary sort of in between. You film it for two, three minutes. You clip it down to shave it for time. You go shorter, shorter, shorter, as much as you can. Anyway, I did a draft. I was rewatching it on my phone. My kids were around me, they were watching tv. And then I saw a Mr. Beast video that had a interesting thumbnail and it was a short, and I clicked on it and he said, this is Puffer Fish, the most poisonous fish in the world, and I'm going to eat it. And as soon as he said that, my son across the room goes, wait, what gets up comes over to my phone.

Nick Clason (19:36):
And I just wanted to highlight, I think our hooks for our student ministry social media are good, but I played that video where it's like an AI generative voice that says Drafting Avengers. And then we start going back and forth. He didn't care. Mr. Beast gives his hook. Boom, he's instantly hooked. Mr. Beast has years and years of experience and has absolutely crushed of the game in doing this. And so I'm not trying to say that I'm some sort of Mr. Beast knockoff or anything. I'm actually trying to point out that Mr. Beast is amazing at this, and we can learn some things from him as far as crafting good hooks and stopping the scroll. But he does such an amazing job, and so watch what he does. Look at the amount of B-roll that he does, the amount of text he does, how quick he's moving things, how he's moving people's attention along so that they don't get bored by his video and how he's grabbing their attention, how he's literally grabbing their attention from across the room to get them to come up and over and watch his video. Now, you and I we're not in there to make money. You and I were in there to share the message of hope of Jesus, which is meaningful, impactful, and powerful and worth it. And so I think you and I can hone in on this skill, but I'm going to give you a one surefire way in the next section that you can just do this in one click. It's going to change the game. Let's check it out.

Nick Clason (21:02):
So one of the ways in which we do this, we craft this viral framework, is we need an editor. You don't have to edit, but if you edit, your videos will be better. It's just the way it is. So I'm going to give you three tools, three kind of options to explore. The first one is Cap Cut. Cap Cut is a free editor owned by TikTok. They have a mobile device or a mobile app for your device, and then they also have a web-based browser that you can use on just like a computer. So you would import your video into Cut, and you would use that to start editing it. You can edit it in its long form version if you want to do that. And you can also edit it for vertical based video. So nine by 16. Okay. Additionally, it's going to have a little bit of a learning curve, but has a ton of free resources on there, text editors, sound effects, transitions, things that are super next level cap cut has done an amazing job and they made it really, really easy and really, really accessible.

Nick Clason (22:10):
The second option is one that is going to require a little bit of a higher learning curve. I mentioned it earlier, but my complete crash course on Adobe Premier Pro and Adobe Photoshop. It's a three-part playlist that will help walk you through how to edit a long form video, how to edit a short form, vertical based video, and then how to create graphics using Adobe Photoshop, and then how to kind of put all of that together. It's worth it. It's expensive. I think for churches. It's something like $34 per month for two users using the Adobe Creative Cloud, but that's going to get you access to Adobe Premier, Adobe Photoshop After Effects, InDesign, Adobe Audition, like all the things that you could possibly need in the Creative Cloud is available for you under the Creative Cloud umbrella for that cost. It's hefty, it's a big jump, but this next one is free, completely free at least for trial version.

Nick Clason (23:11):
And I have the link down below in the show notes. It is called Opus Pro. And here's what you do. You film your long form video, and then you upload it into Opus Pro, and then it takes a minute to upload, and then it takes a minute for it to analyze it, but you can upload it and then click submit and then walk away, and then you'll get an email when it tells you that it's ready to go, so you don't have to sit there and kind of babysit it anymore. And then it'll give you 10 to 14 viral videos with captions on screen and graphics, as well as the option for an intro context, sort of like hook type thing. And it will do it all for free up until you use that all of your credits. And then I just bought Opus Pro at my church for $119 for a year worth of content, which is pennies on the dollar.

Nick Clason (24:08):
And so if you don't want to use it, it has a watermark. The watermark looks like this. So you can make that decision if you want that or not. But if you pre-fill your messages, and if you take my 40 done for you ideas and fill in things like drafts and some of the other ideas I have for you and you use Opus Pro, then you can filter in the rest of your content on your social media calendar. If you want to do 5, 10, 14 different posts on your social media throughout the week, one or two, maybe even three if you want to be super aggressive. But I recommend one or two posts per day video based on all the platforms, and Opus will help fill that. In fact, if you get 14 from Opus, you can do all teaching clips two a day every single day, all the way throughout your week.

Nick Clason (24:58):
I detail and outline how to do all that in my ebook, but Opus is an amazing free resource. Like I said, link down below in the show notes to help you fill that strategy out. And best thing of all is it does almost all the things that we talked about for creating a viral clip on social media. And here's why this matters because students matter and people matter to Jesus, and they're spending an exorbitant amount of time on social media, and there's a lot of bad things out there, but there's also the opportunity to redeem it for good, which is why I believe that every youth ministry needs a strong social media and digital presence. And that video is going to be linked right here on the screen. Make sure that you check that out. We're making digital discipleship easy and accessible. Don't forget, and as always, to stay hybrid.

You can get full episode transcripts at:
http://www.hybridministry.xyz/051

You can watch the show at:
http://www.youtube.com/@clasonnick

TikTok:
http://www.tiktok.com/@clasonnick

Instagram:
http://www.instagram.com/hybridministry

SHOWNOTES
http://www.nucleus.church

TIMECODES
00:00-02:45 Intro
02:45-07:36 Should My Church Focus on Social Media or Website?
07:36-17:06 There are too many announcements to make, what do I do?
17:06-21:56 What are Digital Media Ideas for Churches in 2023?
21:56-25:03 What are my Top 5 Cell Phone Apps as a Content Creator
25:03-26:02 Outro

TRANSCRIPT
Nick Clason (00:01):
Well, hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Hybrid Ministry Show. In this episode, we are going to be answering three pressing and one maybe not so pressing church communication related questions. Before we do, excited to have you with us. I am here drinking my coffee Joffreys if you know, you know, in my new Avengers mug, cuz we just got back from Disney World. It was amazing. Uh, I took a week off from recording and editing and all the things, but you missed nothing cuz we did some peer recording. So you are all set to go. Anyway, pumped about that. If you, uh, want to see any of the recaps of that stuff, it is on my YouTube channel, my TikTok, or if you just wanna see me hold my new Avengers mug that is currently streaming on YouTube right now as well. If you're just listening to this, you can go to the link in our show notes and hit the YouTube button, hit the subscribe, hit the bell, hit the, like, all those things are good for the algorithm.

Nick Clason (01:03):
Help us get found. If you're just watching on YouTube and you're like, wait, this is a podcast. Yes it is, it's a podcast. Come hang out with us. Link in the show notes for that in every single episode we provide for you and 100% completely free transcript. Just head to the website and check it out. And, uh, in addition to that, we have a completely free ebook. It is basically your step-by-step guide on how to create a TikTok, post it, save it, and then post it to other social platforms so that you can be up on what's going on social media right now, vertical video is king and it is giving the church a leg up for one of the very first times in social media history. So we don't want you to be missing out on that. Finally, hey, if you are here, a rating, a review would be incredible.

Nick Clason (01:51):
It really helps us get indexed and found and helps get this word out to other people. So if you feel so inclined to leave a rating or a review, we would just absolutely love that. Without any further ado, let's dive into these three pressing and one not so pressing church communication questions. They are going to be question number one, what should I focus on first? Social or my website? Question number two, there are altogether too many events happening at my church to effectively announce anything. What do I do? I have some advice on that. And what is the best digital media for churches in 2023? What should I be doing? And they're maybe not as popular out there. Like, what are some ideas? And finally, what are my top five used apps on my phone? So there you go. That's what we're diving into. Let's go.

Nick Clason (02:46):
Okay, question number one, what should I focus on? Should it be social or should it be my website? And this one's, honestly, my personal estimation, pretty easy. I think the answer should be your website. Here's a couple reasons why. It is your home base. If you create your website, you own it. You are the, you are the primary real estate manager of it. If you're on social media and you're growing a following over there, you should do that as well. But if you had to pick between one or the other, social media is a little bit finicky because it changes its rules. I e the algorithm you've been there before where someone's gotten big on, on some sort of platform, whether it be Facebook or Instagram or TikTok. And then one of those platforms shifts underneath them, the algorithm, and they're no longer getting found.

Nick Clason (03:38):
Their videos are not getting as many plays, they're not getting as many likes, and that's because they are not the owner of their content. They're on borrowed or rented space on social media. Meanwhile, on your website, you can make it everything that you need or want it to be. And I honestly recommend, and I, this is not an original idea with me at all. I stole this one 1000% from the guys up at Pro Church Tools Nucleus Church, but make it your centralized hub. The reason for that is because like on social media, for example, you might post, uh, a fleeting thought or an idea or a devotional or, uh, engage in ministry in the dms in some sort of way with people. However, if, if you are using social media as your primary vehicle for announcements, if it is a glorified billboard, then people are going to be like, wait, I saw that post a couple of weeks ago, let me scroll back and try and find it.

Nick Clason (04:37):
That's a pain in the butt, man. But if you put it on your website and if they know, if people know that it's on your website, then what you can do is you, when they ask you a question, you can be like, Hey, yeah, the answer is whatever. But also it's on the website. Anytime you need that and you do that a few times to any individual person and they learn, you kind of start to feel like a jerk, like early on with it. Like we're in that phase right now. We just got a website that we are dumping everything too. I told you a couple episodes ago, it's not exactly what I hoped it would be. I want to go with like a nucleus site. Uh, but we have to go, you know, with our church communications people. Uh, I, I work in our youth mystery department and so like I have to make sure that what I'm doing jives with the rest of the church, which I totally get and I'm am in support of that.

Nick Clason (05:28):
Um, however, because of that, the website has certain things on it that we just, we are not able to kind of work around ourselves yet. And so, uh, anyway, all that to be said, it's still a full service location. And so if a parent or someone's like, Hey, you send an email a couple weeks back, where was that information about? Or what you can just say, yeah, yeah, you know, camp deadline is May 31st, but also did you know that it's on the website at film url? And you say that, you just start saying that a bunch, right? And it becomes like a part of your, like vernacular a part of your answer. And that's why I think that you should go website first because website is your own real estate. It's the equivalent of owning or renting an Airbnb from somebody for vacation, which can be fun, it can be exciting, it can be sexy.

Nick Clason (06:23):
And you have like all your stuff. Like that's kinda like social media, right? It's kind of fun, it's kind of exciting and it might even feel a little more sexy than building out a full website. But at the end of the day, you don't own it. It's owned by Mark Zuckerberg or someone in China who, whoever's owning TikTok or the YouTube gods that be that pick the algorithm. But if you own your house, it's not as fun. You know, when the HVAC system goes out that it's on you to fix. You can't just call the owner or call the landlord. Like that's your responsibility because it's your house and you own it, however, it's yours and you build equity in it and you get to ride the housing market and it's all the unseen, not as fun, not as glamorous, not as shiny things, but it is still better.

Nick Clason (07:09):
That's how we, we all know, like when you own a house, it's better. However, it's more of a pain in the butt and it's not as shiny, it's not as glamorous, but it's better. So that's what I would recommend. I would recommend if you have to pick between the two social or website, definitely lean website. Make sure that you own your real estate, your videos, your uh, announcements, your, uh, people are aware of where to go and what to do when they get there. Okay? There are too many ministries and too many events vying for attention and wanting to be announced. What do I do? Well, I would create some sort of rubric, some sort of, uh, church communications, uh, ranking system. And you have to make a determination and certain things get certain priority, right? Like the Easter service, which affects the entire church body is going to get all the publicity and all the stage time.

Nick Clason (08:10):
Meanwhile, the woman's bunko night, while still important and still matters and no hard feelings to Phyllis who's planning it, uh, is not going to maybe get the same amount of announcement or same amount of run, but you know how it goes, right? You don't announce it. And now Phyllis is angry because you didn't announce her thing from the stage, but you got Pastor John over here who needs the Easter announcement to go out as well. And so you're trying to make Phyllis and Pastor John both happy, but you work for Pastor John and Phyllis is just this like, uh, volunteer sweet old lady who's volunteering for the women's ministry, but you work for Pastor John, right? And so that's kind of, that's what maybe the mental gymnastics are that you're going through when you're determining what to announce and how to announce it. Now here's the thing.

Nick Clason (08:59):
I think that churches have very much fallen in prey to announcements being a one track sort of thing. It being the announcement time on Sunday morning from the platform. And that's it. And that's just simply not true. So, uh, while you can create your, uh, rubric and you can grade like, okay, the woman's bunko night, unfortunately we don't have enough space for these announcements. Uh, and so it's gonna get bumped from the Sunday morning announcement time. However, there are other channels and other avenues in which you can lean into and which you can help create so that people are in the loop about what is going on. And so create your rubric, create your metric or your grading system about what pops through what actually gets a stage announcement so that you're not, you know, announcing 25 things, you're announcing only a handful of things or, or honestly, if I could find a way, I would make it be announcing only one thing so that people really know it.

Nick Clason (09:58):
And then really craft that announcement to be good and well done. Um, captivating, inspirational, perhaps try and find a way to share a story. People are gonna connect to a story, especially a story about life change and then announce it. But then, yeah, you did, you left Phyllis's, uh, bunko on the cutting room floor. So what are you gonna do? So there are multiple communications avenues and I wanna just kinda like, uh, stream of consciousness, rapid fire, some of the ones that I have, uh, or that are in my brain and maybe, and so doing that, that sparks something that works for you and uh, you can use that in your setting as well. But, uh, one of them is your pre-roll, right? As people are coming into service, utilize that time with rotating or scrolling announcement slides. It's not very innovative, I know, and it might even seem outdated and antiquated, but it is, I think, worth it because you have a very captive audience, people filtering in, sitting down, looking ahead at a screen.

Nick Clason (10:57):
And you can have announcements, you can have things popping through, obviously. Also you can utilize, uh, your social media channels on there though. What I would do is I would try and lean into what social media is made for. So for example, instead of just posting graphics on reels or TikTok or just like graphics on your Instagram or Facebook feeds, I would find a way to creatively, uh, do memes or games or, uh, silly like p o v type content. But you do those things and it, it adjacently announces your event while also being something on there that is, uh, leaning towards entertainment. Uh, also think about signage. Where is the signage and what is the available signage in your church? Could be bathroom signage, which is one of my favorites. Having a sign above urinals for men is a great place to put something because why no man wants to look side side.

Nick Clason (11:53):
So look good straight ahead. Okay? Uh, you also got banners if you have like a table setting, like we, in our student ministry, we have a table setting, um, where like people sit around round tables and there's a like clear placard that sits right in the middle. You can do tabletop type announcements or tabletop type signs. You also have your work weekly church email and then also your weekly stage announcement, right? And then I think every announcement, no matter what should get included into your one-stop centralized hub, your one stop website so that everybody knows no matter what to always go there. So even if they see Bunco in the pre-roll, but they're like, ah, shoot, I didn't catch all the details, that's okay, because they know it's on the website, right? It's the same thing. That's true of like, if you watch a movie trailer, if you watch a movie trailer online, you're like, man, I have to go see the new Marvel movie.

Nick Clason (12:48):
Yeah, you do. But what it didn't do was it didn't pop up an end card at the end of the trailer and say your hometown, your movie theaters and the showing times for each day for the next week. No, it puts the onus on you If you wanna see the movie, if you wanna go to Bunko night, then you will chase down that information. Historically, what's been the issue, churches haven't done a very good job of making that information readily available. They think they do by, by including it in the announcement or the graphic is like a bunko thing. And then it's just got like worlds and worlds of text, like six 30 to eight in the f building with Phyllis. And uh, if you want to go make sure you email Phyllis at flower lady 37 29 aol.com cuz apparently Phyllis is still using aol.

Nick Clason (13:38):
And, uh, if you have questions, you can swing by the welcome desk in the front lobby. And you see what I'm saying? Like, instead, if you streamline everything and you say Bunco Night Info app, boom, your website, everything you go to your website provides itself as a bit of a backdrop. Now let me give you one of my favorite church communications hacks of all time. And that hack is, this is, this is a little bit not a pet peeve, but I I just, I think that you're missing an opportunity if you do it this way. So for example, I am an author on Download Youth ministry, and one of the things that has made very famous, made very available are five minute countdowns. They put the five minute countdown on, um, right, you know, five minutes before the service is supposed to start. And that's a very popular thing.

Nick Clason (14:28):
Our churches do it. Your church probably has some sort of iteration of a five minute countdown. One of my pet peeves, or one of the things I just honestly think is a little bit of a miss is that you have a, a lot of churches, they'll have a pre-roll and then at the five minute mark, they'll switch off of the pre-roll to this five minute countdown. Um, and this actually happened yesterday where I was gonna church. I looked around five, there were, I don't know, probably like 20% of the people that were going to end up being in the service, um, or that ended up being in the service at that time. And they switched off the pre-roll, which was very information and announcement heavy to a generic, um, a good, very good like cinematic good, uh, picture and encapsulation of the church and the life of the church and like serving and events and all the things, but no information.

Nick Clason (15:21):
And in that five minute time, it went from 20% of the service to probably like 70, 80% of the service. And all the people that walked into the room at that moment, they didn't get any of that benefit of the pre-roll. And if they got in there a minute early, if the pre-roll was still rolling, they could sit there and they could still see the last little bit of the pre-roll. They would still catch some of the things and maybe, maybe Bunco would roll in front of them and then they would know, oh, Bono's coming up. And so one of my favorite hacks is create a pre-roll and, and create a dynamic pre-roll if you have what it takes, one that's video based and all the things. And then, and instead of swapping a five minute countdown, just create a loop and then put a five minute countdown on through pro presenter or just throw a five minute overlay on a video and render out two videos, one without a five minute countdown, one with a five minute countdown.

Nick Clason (16:17):
And so that way when they switch from the pre-roll to the five minute countdown, the sa it's the same thing. That's, that's what I do in my ministry. It's the same video. Just one has a five minute countdown timer on it, one does not. And that's one of my favorite hacks because I believe that you have a captive audience of people filtering into your auditorium. They are actually paying attention to the screen once it starts counting down, or they should be at least because they don't want to be late or they have to get from one place to the other. And so in so much as paying attention, the theory then is that they're at least going to be mildly aware of the other announcements that are going on behind the five minute countdown. So that's one of my favorite hacks for you as a church communications person.

Nick Clason (17:01):
Hope it's helpful. Let me know if you implement it. Let's move on to question three. What are three digital media ideas for churches in 20 20, 20 23 that aren't as popular? So idea that I have number one that I don't think is as popular now, they're very popular, don't get me wrong, but they may not be as popular with churches are podcasts. And I don't just mean your Sunday sermon podcast, though, you 100% should be doing that. It's probably the lowest hanging fruit and the most available opportunity for you to start regularly posting podcasts and a podcast catcher. But I also think what about finding ways to create podcasts that educate, that explain, um, different facets of faith or spiritual disciplines or fill in the blank, right? But podcasts I think are an amazing tool that churches should be leaning into as churches. Church leaders and pastors are professional content creators.

Nick Clason (18:02):
And so your people, you are creating content for them every single week on a Sunday morning. And for quite frankly, it is a lecture style piece of information that you are creating for your church. So why are you not taking that skill that you have honed that you are good at? Um, and honestly, maybe you're like, well, I'm, I'm the senior pastor, like I don't have time. Maybe you work at a church with additional other staff and pastors who don't preach as often as you. Maybe this would be an outlet or an avenue for them to exercise their teaching gift to grow in what their, uh, and what God has given to them. Uh, but they don't have time or you don't have time or the sermon preaching calendar doesn't allow for the time or the space for them to get a lot of stage time.

Nick Clason (18:47):
That's okay. You can give this other outlet, this other avenue for them to exercise those gifts for them to teach people via podcast. So I think podcasts are a really creative way and a really potentially effective way for churches to lean in, um, and to create additional content for their churches and for people who are interested in what the church has to offer. Another idea that I have are TikTok style teaching or inspirational videos. So while podcast is long form, I think TikTok style videos are the best, like zig to the zag of that where they are, uh, short. So podcast, really no, no matter how long it is, you can go as long as you want. TikTok, make it as short as humanly possible, and perhaps to even marry those two, just film your podcasts and then cut out clips of from the podcast.

Nick Clason (19:43):
And then the short videos can serve as both inspirational and educational, but they can also serve as an advertisement of sorts or a marketing technique for your podcast. So you post on your social channel some of those short clips, and then people begin to discover and realize that there's a longer form version of this out there via audio podcast or even video podcast. I mean, if you're gonna capture the, the video, uh, and you have the bandwidth for it, there's really no reason to then marry the, the audio and the video, put it together, and then just create a video based podcast as well. And then idea number three that I have eBooks right, the, in the same vein, you are a professional content creator. So just take the content that you have that's good, that's useful, that's beneficial that you have studied, that the Holy Spirit has laid on your heart, and that you then are now, uh, presenting and showing to your church congregation.

Nick Clason (20:40):
Take that and put package that in a way that makes it available for people. Why maybe you, uh, maybe it hits a different audience than those who are in the church on Sunday morning. Maybe they weren't there on Sunday morning, but it's still something that's out there and that's available for them to do, right? Like if you're a pastor and you create like three ideas for studying God's word, you can create that in an infographic or an ebook or something like that, and you can offer that to your church and you have that to live on in perpetuity. Meanwhile, if you preach that sermon on March 12th, 2016, that's lost back on March 12th, 2016. But if you repurpose some of that content, then anytime anyone has a question about, Hey, how do I spend time with God, Jack? You know, I created this resource, and you just pull it back out or you, you post it on your website or you have it somewhere that's accessible, that's available for people to come to, for you to share with them.

Nick Clason (21:37):
And that's, I think another way that you can help kind of, uh, rejuvenate or repurpose some of your already created content into something that feels fresh. It isn't fresh, but it's beneficial and it's helpful to people's spiritual growth and their journey and their information and understanding of God's word. All right, question number four. What are the top five apps that I as a youth pastor and as a, uh, content creator used on my phone often? Number one is Google Drive. I would be sunk without Google Drive. I store all of my photos, all of my videos on Google Drive, and they sit there and then I download them off of Google Drive and then I post them and then I can delete the storage off of my phone. So that is the first thing. I would absolutely be lost without it. I use it both for business and for personal, and I can toggle very easily between both of those accounts in my Google Drive.

Nick Clason (22:33):
Do it often, do it all the time. The other app on my phone that I use a lot is Cap Cut. There are templates galore out there, and TikTok, um, honestly is pushing cap cut templates right now. So if you post a tick, uh, cap cut template, you can go viral pretty easy. Um, I have not had as good of luck with that on TikTok, but you know, where I have is YouTube shorts. I can get videos up over a thousand views pretty easily just by using a cap cut template. Uh, another thing that I use is gonna sound weird, but I use my Google Chrome app all the time. And if I post something that I created in TikTok by itself, then I go into Google Chrome and I search, download TikTok video without watermark, I go to the very first search engine result there.

Nick Clason (23:18):
I paste the link from my TikTok video, I download it, I copy the caption that I, that I created in TikTok. I go over to Instagram and I post it and I paste the, the caption and then I go over to YouTube shorts and I post the video and I paste the caption. And that is one of the quickest, easiest and hackiest ways for me to get the TikTok, uh, watermark off of my videos and onto other social media platforms. Couple others that I use that are just kind of for me, uh, cast box. I'm an Android guy, so I don't have the purple podcast app for podcasts, but I listen to podcast galore. Like I told you at the beginning. I was in Disney World last week and I got behind on my podcast. So I have something like 60 podcasts in my catcher right now that I need to, uh, pound through.

Nick Clason (24:06):
I also am subscribed to maybe way too many, and so I might need to cut some of those back. But I listen to podcasts a lot. I have a decent commute and so, um, I'm able to, you know, listen to them as I go. And finally, one, uh, that I don't use a ton, but it's good to have there for reference is Kindle. I use Kindle across all of my devices. Uh, if I'm reading some sort of book for work, I try to get it in a Kindle version. That way I don't have to lug the book with me. Or if like I'm at a doctor's or dentist's office and I wanna sit and wait for a minute, I can pull it open and read wherever I am on my phone, on my iPad, on my computer. Um, and then I can quickly reference back to other things, other books, other, um, ideas that I've read before.

Nick Clason (24:49):
If I want to use them for something on social media or whatever the case might be, those are five must have apps that I use on a pretty frequent and regular basis to help make my life easier as a social media manager in a church. Well, hey everyone. So glad you hung out with me on this episode. And if you're on the YouTube stream, you're looking at my Avengers mug right now. Glad that you hung out and you stuck around as always. Transcript hybridministry.xyz, give us a light, give us a rating, give us a share, give us a review. All those things would mean the world to us. And as a token of my and our appreciation back to you, we would love to give you our 100% completely free ebook title. Have I already ruined my church's TikTok account? The answer is no. But go download the book so that you know how to use and post to TikTok whenever, and however you want, head to the link in the show notes for that. And without any further ado, we're gonna get you outta here. Thanks for hanging out. Don't forget to, as always, stay hybrid.

FREE E-BOOK:
https://www.hybridministry.xyz/articles/ebook

YOUTUBE:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9pjecCnd8FVFCenWharf2g

TIKTOK:
https://www.tiktok.com/@clasonnick?lang=en

INSTAGRAM:
https://www.instagram.com/hybridministry/

GOT QUESTIONS? WE GOT ANSWER:
https://www.hybridministry.xyz/contact

SHOWNOTES
RUNNING A DIGITAL AD:
https://www.hybridministry.xyz/009
MY CHURCH YOUTH MINISTRY ON SOCIAL MEDIA:
https://www.instagram.com/crosscreekstudents/
MY CHURCH ON SOCIAL MEDIA:
https://www.instagram.com/crosscreekcolleyville/

TIMECODES
00:00-01:56 Intro - VBS & Camp
01:56-05:31 Classify the Proirity of Your Events
05:31-08:36 Before your Event
08:36-13:17 During Your Event
13:17-15:05 After Your Event
15:05-16:41 Outro

TRANSCRIPT
Nick Clason (00:00):
Well, hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Hybrid Ministry Show. You can head to http://hybridministry.xyz for all of your needs, including transcripts, show notes, and old archived episodes. But today, and in this episode, what I want to talk about is I want to talk about church communications and church social media for VBS and summer camp. How do you handle these two major monumental tent pole style events in your church that you no doubt are having to already probably try and reconcile and figure out? And so we want, I want to talk about what to do before your event, what to do during your event and what to do after your event. Now, here's what you need to know. In most cases, when this episode is dropping here in the middle of June, you were probably already full bore into your pre VBS or pre-camp planning, and I get that.

Nick Clason (00:56):
And so this episode may be helpful for future, uh, years, future seasons, as well as give you some good ideas or thoughts during your, um, during your event or after your event of ways to handle church communications or church social media. Before we dive in, I wanna remind you that we are on YouTube, head to our YouTube channel to subscribe. We're on TikTok and I wanted to let you know that you can head in either of those places, the website or on YouTube or on TikTok to our show notes where you can get our completely free ebook on how to post to TikTok. It'll also put you on our email newsletter, which we are going to start getting going on a more regular basis. So far it's mostly just been, Hey, sign up for this ebook. Thanks. You're on our email newsletter and we've done nothing with that.

Nick Clason (01:40):
Um, but we're gonna start sending out some thoughts and ideas here in the future. Uh, noth nothing in the works just yet, but it will be coming. So without any further ado, let's dive in. How do you handle VBS and how do you handle camp in your church? Let's go. All right, so at our church, we have events classified as tier one, tier two, and tier three. Tier one are like the lowest rung events. They may get like an a scrolling announcement and that's it. Tier two is a little higher and then tier three, all right, honestly, I might have that reverse tier one might be the best. Tier three might be like the worst quote unquote. Uh, but both VBS and camp are like the top tier events. And so in your church, I would recommend that VBS and camp also be top level events.

Nick Clason (02:26):
If you are a senior pastor, uh, that recommendation is for you. If you're a church communications person, that recommendation is for you. If you're a youth pastor or kids pastor listening and you're screaming at your car or your phone or your headphones right now, like, yes, it is the most popular event. Like, you already know that, right? And you're trying to get other people on board with that idea. So I would recommend making it your top tier event and pulling out as many of the stops as it takes in order for you to be able to do that. Now, before we dive into the pre, during and post suggestions for your event, I do just say, if you don't have an event or a communications classification, uh, spelled out in like a handbook of some sorts, let me, let me recommend that that might be your first step because one of the challenges in churches, you, every ministry wants to announce their thing.

Nick Clason (03:15):
The women's minister wants to announce her thing. The senior adults ministry wants to announce their thing. The college ministry wants to make sure that their thing is announced. The kids' ministry of course, wants VBS announced Student Ministry of courts wants camp announce. How do you announce those? How do you celebrate those when they're over? Like how do you categorize and classify what gets air time? What gets screen time, what gets stage time? And that is where I would say if you have a classification, tier one, tier two, tier three, and then explain what falls under each of those categories, it's helpful, um, so that like people can request those things. And then when, like ladies bunko on a Friday night at, you know, Pauline's house is vying for the top tier event, you as a church communications person, you're gonna have to say, well, that's not a top tier event because it doesn't affect more than 50% of our population.

Nick Clason (04:05):
Or, you know, whatever the reasons might be. But sit down, work through what those things might be. A good rule of thumb is typically that you want the event or you want the thing that you're announcing that you're, you know, making known. You want it to affect a wide and vast majority of your people. And the reason that VBS does that is because it not only is for all of the kids in your church, but also you're gonna need just about as many volunteers or more than kids in your church to, to step up and serve. And so it is a big wide scale production. The entire church, the entire staff is usually involved in it. It's usually like a non-negotiable. You are not on vacation if you're on church staff during that week, like you are there. And so that's one of the reasons why it is such a top tier event camp is a little trickier, honestly, cuz it probably doesn't hit 50% of your people.

Nick Clason (04:53):
Uh, but it is a massive financial investment. And it is also probably your student ministry's most, uh, coveted or or biggest like event moment throughout the year. Um, it does also require a good portion, definitely a good portion of your student ministry, student ministry staff, student ministry volunteers. Does it include everybody? Maybe not. Um, but you may. And and that's where, right, like you can have your, you can have your, uh, categorizations, your classifications, but then sometimes like in that case you may fudge that and be like, this is still gonna be tier one. So let's dive into some ideas that you can do promoting and before your event, let's go.

Nick Clason (05:33):
All right, so if this is a top tier event and before your event starts, I wanna just give you some ideas. Do whatever you can pull all the stops to give it all the publicity that you can. What does that mean? Well, I would say give it all of your in church announcement moments. Give it all of your, um, give it all of your promotion that you can do inside the church. Video announcements, stage announcements, bathroom signs, uh, ev everything that you pull out, church bulletin, everything that you do on a week to week basis for your church. Give it everything that you got. All right. Like put all your gas behind all your effort, energy behind this event. Make sure that everyone in your church at least is very well aware of it. And then from the digital perspective and digital standpoint, how do you do and what do you do beyond that?

Nick Clason (06:22):
Well, I would recommend that you create for yourself a individual dedicated landing page on your church website. Maybe it's, maybe you buy a domain, maybe it's whatever the theme is, you know, dot com. Like, uh, if your theme is like wet and wild rapids.com. Now if you're doing like VBS in a can or VBS from like a curriculum content place, that that website is probably gonna be taken by another church or just by the, the VBS curriculum provider in general, right? But create some sort of like website and maybe you can get like VBS in yourtown.com or VBS in yourtown.church or something like that, that you can just own and use every single year. And then recycle it and refresh it to match and go along with whatever the theme is. But then when people, um, are searching for VBS in your town, that is hopefully gonna index well in SEO and in Google search for the town that your church is in.

Nick Clason (07:18):
Uh, but, but create a website. And in my mind, that website can be your centralized hub. Now, you should already have some sort of centralized hub to your church. And so if people do go to your church and then they do wind up going to vbs, you can just simply link it over to that one. It can also be a subset of your page. You already are paying for a church page. You can just do, you know, whatever church.com/vbs, uh, or whatever church.com/camp. But give it its own dedicated page. And in vbs laying a camp, you want to do packing list, you wanna do themes, you want to be, let that be the place where parents can go for daily recaps posts, uh, links out to social links, out to videos, um, packing lists, forms if you're going away. Um, let's see. Uh, like I like to include Spotify playlists, uh, that the kids, uh, have been worshiping to so that people can access that. They can continue to listen to that on their own time. And then also, last but not least, an idea might be put some energy and effort behind some Facebook advertising. All right, I'll link in our episode here on how to run a Facebook ad, uh, with me and Matt from a couple of, uh, almost a year ago at this point. But I'll link the how-to step-by-step process of running, creating, targeting on a Facebook ad. But get some ad power behind your, uh, your two events, VBS and camp.

Nick Clason (08:38):
All right, what are you gonna do during vbs and what are you gonna do during camp? Right? Like I said, odds are when this video and, uh, podcast drop, you're already there. You don't really have a lot of the, the pre-work probably to do anymore. Or if not, you're, you're, you're minimal. And most of those decisions have already been, it may be too late to create a website. It may be too late, you know, to uh, run an ad. And so during, I would do whatever you can to create daily content for your screens in your room. And so what I mean by that is you're gonna have large projector screens, probably wherever you are, camp vbs, either of those. And if you can have 1, 2, 3, uh, photographers, videographers around the better VBS is probably easier for that cuz you can get volunteer ones, um, camp, you probably need to pay to have that person go and pay them to be there, right?

Nick Clason (09:26):
You gotta pay for their, their room and board and lodging. And then you also have to pay them to be there. If you're on a bigger church staff, you may have a full marketing department, communications department and they may be able to spare a, a member of their team to go to camp with you for the week. Um, and so you don't have to necessarily pay them cuz they're getting paid by the church, but you do have to pay for them to be there, if that makes sense. But those investments are worth it because capturing those memories, capturing those photos and being able to capture those videos are amazing. And one of the best things I think to do is every single day have a daily recap that you post on your screen. So as soon as the kids come in, the top of the service is a daily recap video.

Nick Clason (10:07):
They can screen for their team, they can scream for 'em, they see themselves, they can laugh, they can giggle, they can sing along with the songs. I think all those are great, amazing ideas. Um, also I think you should post daily recap stuff for social media. So think about the multiple avenues in which you may wanna post. You may wanna post on, uh, the feed, Facebook feed, Instagram feed in on Instagram. It's gonna be 10 photos. You may also wanna post videos or things in your stories. Um, and you may also wanna post some reels. So one of the things we just got done with VBS this last week at our church, our church was doing a daily recap video with like a voiceover. So one of the people on staff did it, I did it from one of the days cuz we were hosting, um, a sixth grade event called Cross the Creek Week.

Nick Clason (10:50):
Um, and it's for our incoming, uh, sixth graders that was running in tandem in conjunction with their VBS across the, across the way. Um, but I would do like a recap, Hey, here's the, here's the theme, here's the word of the day, here's the verse. Um, and all the while there was just b-roll back behind of things going on events, uh, footage that they had for, for the event. I also posted on our own individual student ministry channels. The first two days I just did basic recaps. I just like got my phone out and just kind of captured the day, put a video on it, honestly edited it in TikTok or cap cut and just like let it be. And it was super simple text on screen, you know, cross Creek week day one. Uh, super easy way to do that. The, the third day I pulled students aside individually and I asked them, what's your favorite part of this event?

Nick Clason (11:38):
And I, I just clipped all those together real fast. And then on the fourth and final day we had our missions offering and we offered a contest to our sixth graders that if they were able to meet some sort of goal, um, they could pie a leader of their choice in the face. And so there were six groups, six teams, and five of the six teams met that goal. And so five of the six teams got a pie leaders. And so we captured five pies in the face. If you're on YouTube, check this out, here's my photo of me getting pied in the face. Cuz they did in fact choose me for one of them. Um, but I posted a video all five, like boom, boom, boom, just real fast. And then at the end, the group photo of the five of us being pied.

Nick Clason (12:16):
And so, um, I captured that. So on social, I would just, uh, look for different ways to capture what's going on. Um, I thought what, what my church was doing with the voiceover for the theme. I thought that was really good, um, and really well done. Um, and so I would, again, so you're looking at the, the challenge with it right? Is that you're looking for, uh, stuff for your screen. So you're looking for 10 80 by 1920, you're also looking for, um, you're also looking, what is that? No, that's 1920 by 10 80, then you're also looking for verticals. So then you're looking for 10 80 by 1920. Uh, so the way you capture it is gonna be different. So if you can have some people like you do social and you do, um, for the screens, vice versa, or you're just gonna have them like, come in, film this way and then come in and film this way, right?

Nick Clason (13:02):
Whatever the case might be, I would, uh, try and find a way. And the more people you hand have, the more hands you have on deck to help with that, the better for during your event that you can produce on a daily sort of basis. Let's check out what we can do after, all right, after, I would do a big total recap of the whole event. So you've done daily recaps and now you're doing like the big total recap that can just be B roll and uh, maybe voiceover or something like that. One of my favorite things to do is bringing that like camp person, uh, with me. The video person to camp is have them capture eight to 12, uh, testimonies of people, um, student and a couple leaders, and then splice that up together with some good B-roll over it and, um, show it in the service or show it in the, um, like whatever sort of recap event you have, uh, for, for your people.

Nick Clason (13:58):
Uh, and also post it, you know, to YouTube clip it up verticals so you can post it to social. Um, we did an event, uh, we will do an event after camp this year called camp. So it's the camp recap, um, and we're gonna invite parents to it. And that's what we're gonna show our, our video for, for camp, for returning students, um, and for returning parents to be able to check out what's going on with, uh, what went on at camp, what went on with student ministry, um, and get that also, um, if it's good enough, it'll be able to get played in your big church lobby. Um, and it, what it'll do is it will help your parents. It'll help your donors, it will help anyone who gave fundraisers invested in student ministry. It will give them a picture of what their financial and what their monetary and what their time investment went to.

Nick Clason (14:45):
And so, uh, this is why I think that capturing these moments digitally, um, and on video is so, so widely important because it just gives such a good picture and it helps bring your church along to what's going on in these monumental events for these, uh, for kid ministry and for student ministry. Well, hey everyone, so glad you hung out. I, uh, am thankful that you stuck around to the end of this video. Hey, I also just want to say like, I hope that you found this helpful and I also hope that you, um, have a great vbs and a great camp this season. Whether you're just finishing it or whether you're jumping into it this week. Um, prayers, blessings on you. I hope that it's amazing for any, uh, if you want to, to preview any of the content we did, I'll link both our, our overall church and, uh, my church's, uh, student ministry, which I run in the show notes.

Nick Clason (15:40):
You can check both of those out. You can again, head to YouTube to subscribe to our YouTube channel. Um, see the photo of me having Pie in the face. Uh, you can also follow me on TikTok for short video clips. And don't forget show notes and transcripts are available every single week http://hybridministry.xyz. This is gonna be episode number 049. Hey, listen, I'm gonna give you quick heads up. I may say that in some future episodes I lost a bunch of episodes on a hard drive, um, that is currently getting recovered now. Um, and so unfortunately, uh, there may be some, some shuffling. That's mostly a problem I have to deal with. Um, but I'm just letting you know that there be, there may be some clerical errors here in the next couple of weeks of me staying episode, whatever, and then it posting later cuz I currently don't have access to it. So anyway, all that to be said. Without any further ado, glad you're here. Thanks for hanging out. Head into the show notes to get everything you need. And as always, don't forget, stay hybrid.

Follow Along on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9pjecCnd8FVFCenWharf2g
Come Hang with Nick on TikTok:
https://www.tiktok.com/@clasonnick?lang=en
Shownotes & Transcripts for this Episode:
http://www.hybridministry.xyz/048

SHOWNOTES
The Original 2023 Posting Strategy:
https://www.hybridministry.xyz/025

FREE E-Book on Posting to TikTok in 2023:
https://www.hybridministry.xyz/articles/ebook

To see Nick's Church's Social Media in Action:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/crosscreekstudents/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4f4bABQ6RgYF8CHY9G4HKw
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@crosscreekstudents?lang=en

TIMECODES
00:00-04:37 Intro
04:37-06:55 Why I'm shifting from posting less content on social media in 2023
06:55-15:30 Reason #1: Quantity to Quality
15:30-18:59 Reason #2: Margin for more variety of Social Media posts
18:59-23:03 In Conclusion

TRANSCRIPT
Nick Clason (00:02):
Hey, what is up everybody? Welcome back to another episode of the Hybrid Ministry Show. I am with you as always as your host, Nick Clason. Excited and thrilled to be with you on this episode. And in this episode, I want to give you my updated church social media posting strategy for 2023. Uh, I will link in the show notes if you've been around any length of time, my ultimate, uh, church social media posting strategy. Um, and I, I gave that back, I believe, around Christmas time, um, in 2022. And so here we are. It's May or June, depending on when you're catching this, or maybe even later if you're watching back through the archives, um, or listening back to the archives. Um, but now I want to just give an update and, uh, say, Hey, here's what I have been doing. Here's where I have been, and here's what I now know and here's the direction that I am now gonna go.

Nick Clason (01:06):
So tune in for that. But before we do, uh, if you haven't already figured out, we are on YouTube. So join us over there. Give us a, like a subscribe, all that stuff. Super duper helps with the algorithm. Um, and we would super appreciate it if any of those things, uh, were available or a thing that you could do for us. Uh, if you're in a podcast catcher, uh, subscribe so that you get this episode for free. It will automatically, uh, download, automatically show up in your feed every single Thursday morning at 4:00 AM when these things drop. And a rating or a review, either on Apple Podcast, on the YouTube podcast, any of those places, Spotify, we are all those places. So we would welcome a rating or a review. Um, it really helps with the algorithm. And, um, I believe in this message. I hope that if you're listening, that you two also believe in this message.

Nick Clason (01:57):
And if you are finding it helpful, um, getting that word out there in some way, just by helping us give it a rating that helps other people find their show, that helps other people attach to the mission message, um, of what hybrid ministry is all about. If, if you're new, you know, what we're essentially saying is, uh, this is not a all about digital ministry, though. There is a lot of elements of digital ministry in here. Um, and this is not all about in-person ministry. What this really is, is this is a melding of the two, and it's helping kind of fuse where, where the road meets between, um, just in person or just on online or just in digital. And so that's why we're calling it hybrid. It's a both and sort of experience. That being said, most churches are really good with their in-person experiences, um, and they may not be as good with some of their hybrid experiences, and it could be streaming your service.

Nick Clason (02:57):
That could be what a hybrid experience is. That's what most churches, uh, do. That's, that's what most of their online or digital strategy is, is like, well, we streamed the service, COVID forced us to buy a camera, stick it in the back of the room and stream the service. And that's all well and good. And if you're doing that, I'd recommend continue doing it. But there are many more ways, I think, to enter into that space, uh, and to offer more than just your Sunday morning experience to your church members, your church attenders, and your perspective people. So again, thank you for joining us. One of the major players right now in 2023. Um, and this will still bear itself out and you're about to see and hear in my updated church, uh, media posting strategy in 2023 is short form, vertical based video. And I have created for you a 100% free ebook.

Nick Clason (03:49):
I would love for you to click the link in the show notes and head there and download your very own copy of it. Uh, it's just a way for you or a church social media manager or an intern or a college student to grab a phone and start creating tos completely free and from scratch. It is an ebook that we created step by step, walking you through. It's titled, have I Already Ruined My Church TikTok account? And we would just love for you to check that out and use it, and hopefully that will be to your benefit and your advantage as you're trying to lean into more and more of the hybrid space here in 2023 in an effort to reach Gen Z and millennials and beyond. So again, without any further ado, glad you're here. Thanks for joining us. Let's dive in to my updated church social media posting strategy in 2023.

Nick Clason (04:38):
The day was May 7th, 2023. That's the day I finally shifted my strategy from before. So a little bit of historical context so that you understand. Like I said, if you wanna go back and listen, drop the link to that in the show notes, check that out. But I have been posting three short form vertical video based content pieces every single day for five days a week. The reason I choose the five days a week thing is because I'm attempting to have rhythm and rest in a Sabbath and a weekend. And so I don't post on Friday and Saturday as a a member of church staff. Sun Sunday is for sure a working day, right? Um, and so therefore I just, I choose Friday and Saturday as my two days off. It works pretty well. So I post Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. That's why really, that's really the rhyme or reason works well with my schedule.

Nick Clason (05:32):
Um, and I would recommend that, like, I would recommend not overdoing it on your days off, because the, the reality is social media is relentless. It is a never ending beast, and it is always hungry. And so the more that you give to it, the more it's gonna want and the more it's gonna need. And so unless you have boundaries, there is really no, uh, stopping to it. And so it's up to you to create the boundaries to stay healthy, to stay in a spot that is gonna keep you mentally strong and all those types of things. So anyway, I've been posting three times a day, five days a week, and I just now shifted down and this is my new strategy. It's not earth shattering, and it's not a big shift. Okay? I've shifted down from three a day to two a day. So let's talk about what caused and what brought me to that shift.

Nick Clason (06:19):
It's multifaceted. There are two main points, and in the next couple sections, I'm gonna break down point number one, I'm gonna break down point number two. Um, but all of this is, while it's not monumental, it is a slight shift. And so if you have been following my recommended strategy, I will explain why I still think that there is benefit and merit to the three posts a day versus maybe the two posts a day. That is honestly ultimately gonna be up to you and up to your call. But before we do that, let me dive into my two-pronged reason for shifting from three a day to two a day. Let's go. Reason number one, why I am making this shift is I am hoping that shifting from posting three day to two a day, it's gonna take my weekly from 15 down to 10. Um, and there's already a rhythm baked in what I'm doing.

Nick Clason (07:12):
Like, for example, we're pre-filing all of our message content on video. And so out of that, I pull three, uh, shorts, three tos every single week, um, that are short message clips, um, Brady Shearer and the, and the people at Nucleus call it social sermons. Um, but essentially we're clipping a, a message with hopefully what I would consider to be a good hook, whether it is or not, I don't know. I'm still growing in that skill, I would say. And then at the end, we're pushing them to go consume longer sections of our YouTube, um, or podcast content. Uh, and so hopefully they find it and then they go, they go discover and, and become, you know, more engaged, more entrenched in what we're doing on social media. Anyway, all that to be said, right? Like, I am trying to, so, so there's three right there.

Nick Clason (08:02):
Okay, so outta my 10. Now I already have three. I only have to come up with seven more. And so ultimately I'm trying to shift, uh, creating quantity content to quality content. Now, I, I have not been trying to produce crap. Like, that's not been my goal, right? By any means. Like, I'm trying to do good work. I'm trying to be thoughtful, I'm trying to be creative, but there's just something about three a day that just feels relentless. And yesterday, May 7th was actually the very, and that May 7th, as of this recording, this will drop multiple weeks later. But, um, May 7th, when I first posted this, like, that was my very first day of posting only two a day. And it, it felt different. Like, I don't know it, you know, you might think like, what are you talking about? Like, it's only one different, like, I know, but it just, it, there's something about it, it just did.

Nick Clason (08:48):
And, uh, the illustration that I would make is I'm trying to produce really good quality content now, like part of the quantity, um, has been a little bit of an antiquated, I think, algorithm thing. And by antiquated, I mean, like a couple months ago, in social media land that's antiquated. You had to show up a lot and you had to show up frequently. You had to show up often. And if you can do three a day, if you can do quality content multiple times a day, you should. And I would still a hundred percent recommend it, but I just know my personal margin, like was not really allowing that anymore. Um, I was ha I was struggling with coming up with good ideas. And in like one of my original iterations of our plan, I've told you before, I work as a youth pastor.

Nick Clason (09:30):
I'm on a team. I'm one of three on our team. I have a director. There's me, I'm like the, the social media guru. And then we have, uh, another associate on our team. And, and she's a female. And so like the two of them, like I I, I dished out some social media stuff early on, like, Hey, you take three and you take three and I'll take the remainder. And they each both struggled with it for different reasons. Um, and, and so I pulled us back together and I said, what if we filmed some stuff together? We got all of us on camera at the same time. Instead of it just being like my talking head than your talking head, than your turn for your talking head. And they loved that idea. It was easier for them, but that dumped a lot more of the editing load back on my plate.

Nick Clason (10:12):
And so as a result of that, that's why I'm making this shift. The other thing is, you, you're in grow mode. I think when you're starting from scratch and you're doing a lot a day, we've, we've grown a lot. Go back to the last episode, I'll link it in the show notes. I give you my progress support. We have a fair bit of followers, we have a fair bit of subscribers in all four of the places. And so I think we've established ourselves. So now I wanna start creating really good content because that is the other thing that the recent TikTok algorithm has made very clear, is that like they are now going for good solid quality content. It's not just about hopping on a trend or a sound. And if you're on that sound, you can ride that wave to a lot of views, a lot of subscribers like that just doesn't work anymore.

Nick Clason (10:56):
I mean, and you saw that born out in some of my most recent like deep dives into analytics, is that like, we're not catching those waves the way that we were hoping that we would. And so therefore we have to not just try to rely on good cap cut templates or good trending sounds and funny dances. We have to actually create quality content that people are going to want to see, watch and consume. That's gonna be the path forward. And so to do that, I'm trying to pull back the number of, of posts I do a day so that I can spend more time on quality content. Right now, I am doing a series, you can check it out. It's at Cross Creek Church right now. I'm hoping it'll change to at Cross Creek students, but TikTok and name changes. So, um, but I'm doing a series, um, on all of our, our short form video platforms called Grow.

Nick Clason (11:47):
And i, I want to give bible and Bible study hack ideas. And so I'm opening with a hook with, it's all gonna be like bot ai voice, uh, filtered. And so it says like, this Bible study hack is an absolute game changer. That's how it starts. And then I post screenshots from the Bible app, or I post, uh, screenshots or downloaded images from other things. Uh, like the one today is gonna be about the, uh, printing press and how we now have access to the Bible everywhere. The early church didn't have that, right? We have it now in our pockets on our devices. Um, I also post one about like second Timothy three 16, how God's word is, uh, God breathe and useful for teaching, re repeating, correcting and training and righteousness and how that's gonna benefit to us. And so break down some of those verses give them hacks in the you version Bible app.

Nick Clason (12:42):
So that's gonna require some more effort on the prep side before I just get out there and start farting out, right? Some, like, some some TikTok. So I'm trying to put in some good thoughtful preparation, and then once I do the prep, then I have to turn around and edit it. So I'm, I'm really seeing a lot of these things from start to finish. In a lot of cases, if you're like a church social media manager, you might just be on the editing portion of it. And so you have the time and the bandwidth. Um, if you have content creators, pastors, whatever you're gonna call them on the backend doing the work, great. Like keep, keep letting them pump that stuff out. And the more you can produce, the better. If you have a good strategy and can post more than five times a day and you're handing it off some people on their days off and whatever, like yes, yes to all of that, right?

Nick Clason (13:29):
But at the end of the day, like, I am making this move to just try and build in a little bit more, uh, margin for me. And so, um, like I said, I'm, I'm trying to, um, in addition to creating good content, I'm trying to become a little bit more aggressive on my edits too. Um, spending more time on my edits, edits that are gonna be, um, good and stop the scroll and grab people's attention and all those types of things. So all of that just takes more time. And the more time I have, uh, is gonna be used to create 10 really good pieces of content every single week that I may have to edit every single one of them in like Adobe Premier Pro or my video editing software of choice. Um, as opposed to just pulling some random quick ones out off my phone, which is what I, I have been doing for some of the filler pieces.

Nick Clason (14:18):
There's nothing wrong with it. I mean, quite honestly, on my personal YouTube shorts, I posted, uh, one of those Jonas Brothers filters a couple weeks ago. Like, don't get stressed, we're gonna get figured out. Oh, deep conversations at the Waffle House. You might have seen it if you've been on TikTok, if not, you're welcome for that glorious singing in your ear holes. But I posted that and it's got like 53,800 views on YouTube and it helped drive my subscribers up over like 30 overnight. So you never know when one of those is just gonna like catch. And quite honestly, I posted it a week and a half ago and yesterday was when I saw my subscribers just freaking skyrocket, like outta nowhere. And so those still play a part. Those still work and those still happen, you know, every now and then. And so, um, leave space for some of those good cap cut templates, I would say for some of those good training audios, um, so that you can ride some of those waves cuz that that stuff does still happen.

Nick Clason (15:19):
So that's reason number one. I'm, I'm hoping to, uh, shift from quantity to quality. I'm hoping to buy back some, some time and some margin just in my working flow and schedule. Reason number two is I would like to create additional quality content that's not just video based. Now, hear me right when I say that you're gonna be, like you said, video was king and it is, and it, it a hundred percent still is. Everything we've posted on social media since I've been at my church has essentially been video based and I love it. Um, but I , i I will liken it to my current rhythm with video is, uh, one day, there was a day when I was working a couple years ago and I had to have a really tough conversation with a resident of mine. We ended up, I believe this day, or maybe it was a couple days later, uh, letting him go and, um, I needed to sit down and create for him what we call in our organization, a p I p a performance improvement plan.

Nick Clason (16:19):
He needed to sign off on that p i p and if he didn't like see it through to the end, we had, we had to and were going to let him go. Um, but my schedule that day was stacked. I had like two liter lunches, um, or a liter coffee and a liter lunch. I had several other meetings filtered in there. And so my boss at the beginning of the day sent me, um, his like templatized, p i p and maybe one that he'd used for someone else before. And by the time I got to that meeting, I literally swapped out the name that he sent me on his, with my, my residence's name and flew into the meeting five minutes late, slapped it down and had the conversation. And, uh, I told my boss about it later and he's like, that's not the way to have that conversation.

Nick Clason (17:03):
And I knew that, right? I just didn't have the margin in my schedule that was necessary that day. There was no other gaps, there was no other breaks to make that happen. And in a lot of the same way, the three a day is very aggressive. It's an aggressive growth strategy and it's caused me to not have any additional margin because I do want to lean into some carousel posts on Instagram that are more like learning based. Um, and that's gonna just take some time with me sitting down in Photoshop, building some of those out, thinking through them. And so all of this really, I would say at the end of the day is, is to build out a more robust social media strategy. One that is including good, strong and frequent quality content, short form video based things, but also has some supplemental content happening like on our Instagram feeds and stuff like that.

Nick Clason (17:54):
And so this isn't because Instagram, uh, is not working on reels anymore, it very much still is, we're still catching fire on there. Um, you know, I I just have a bigger vision and more things I want to do. So more feed posts more, I would like to do more longer form YouTube videos that aren't just messages. Like I would like to start creating some classes and, and fun things like that. But like, I don't have the margin for it. Some podcasts that are more regular, like I would like to do some of those. I don't have the margin for those. And so the, the more things, more a more fleshed out parent Facebook strategy, like, uh, any of that stuff I don't have the time for right now because of what I'm doing with, with Rios. And so this is hopefully gonna help me take a step back on the video slightly.

Nick Clason (18:39):
I, I'm, I'm, I, it's still king and so I don't want to abandon it at all, but I just wanna take a slight step back, focus on my editing and my content and then focus on my additional pieces of content, additional avenues of social media, um, as we trudge forward. So that is why I am shifting here in 2023. So ultimately, in conclusion, this is a margin move for me. I gave it a fair shake, an eight to nine month runway. We evaluated it, we've done that in recent episodes. Um, we took a couple accounts from zero and, and complete scratch to where they are today. And that the, the aggressive three times a day vertical video posting strategy helped get us there. Um, and frankly, I am in a church that, you know, when I, when I dropped my strategy for you, I was taking it from a multi-site megachurch with people from all over the Chicagoland area that called our church home and was still very much in the midst Andros of C O V I D or at least like living in the wake of that to a church that is in Texas in the conservative Bible belt, where they very much live out an in-person experience.

Nick Clason (19:49):
And so those were not apples to apples by any means. And so I was in a church, has a very in-person, um, environment and strategy. And so leaning into a hybrid ministry in there, still necessary for generation Z, not necessarily because it's like a Bible belt, you know, thing. But Gen Z still appreciates and uses hybrid ministry. We've even seen it here. People have appreciated it and liked it, but it's been a shift and it's, it's not the norm for what you would normally see in Texas. And so, uh, I, I say all of this to say like, I only wanna point out how big and how long and how far that hill was that we have been taking. And now as we step back, as we do deep dive into some analytics, it is causing us to shift ever so slightly. And that is why.

Nick Clason (20:38):
And so I hope that you, um, you know, I hope that you can take my context and compare it to yours and like, is this true for us as well or do we have the margin to continue to keep going with what we've been doing? Like I just want to let y'all know and be honest with you, like, this is where I am, this is where I'm coming from and I, um, always just wanna shoot it straight with you. Like here's where I am, here's where I'm coming from and here's how it's going. And uh, I will always do that and I will never fabricate or lie or say one thing's going better than another. Like this is just what it is and how it is. And, and this is where we are today as it stands. And so when I make another shift, you guys will be the first to hear about it.

Nick Clason (21:24):
Cuz I love to workshop it. And, and part of the reason why is y'all help give me a community, uh, for me to like, filter out some of my thoughts. I'll make shifts. But like sitting down to prep this podcast helped me figure out the, these are my two main reasons why I'm making this shift and that makes me more articulate in my job or with my boss or whatever the case might be. So I appreciate it, it's cathartic for me. I hope it's helpful for you. If it is, please drop us a rating, a review, all those things. Grab the free ebook, that will subscribe you to our email newsletter list. And it'll also give you a freebie on your own that you can use and help. Um, moving forward for a social media posting guide and strategy. Um, as always, we are appreciative of you. If you found this episode helpful, please consider sharing it with a friend, a family member, a coworker, a grandparent, your cat. I don't care. But sharing really helps. So if that's something that you have the margin or are able to do, please consider sharing it. We love you guys. Thanks for sticking around until the end and until always, that's not how I do it. Let's, I butchered it.

Nick Clason (22:35):
How do I say it? as always. No, don't forget, this is it. This is it. That was the worst ending in the history of mankind. And you know what, I'm keeping it in there. I face planted in front of you. Not everything's perfect. That's okay. We're gonna show the realness. Don't forget. And as always, stay hybrid.

Follow Along on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9pjecCnd8FVFCenWharf2g
Show Notes & Transcripts: http://www.hybridministry.xyz/045
Follow me on TikTok: http://www.tiktok.com/@clasonnick
FREE E-Book: https://www.hybridministry.xyz/articles/ebook

SHOWNOTES
Plain Text vs. HTML
https://www.mailmunch.com/blog/html-vs-plain-text-email

Singular Calls to Action:
https://unlayer.com/blog/call-to-action-in-emails

Central Hub:
[Nucleus.Church](nucleus.church)
[LHC.life](LHC.life)

Posting Content Online or to YouTube:
http://www.hybridministry.xyz/042

Running Ads:
https://www.hybridministry.xyz/009

TIMECODES
00:00-04:19 Intro
04:19-07:26 What is Marketing? And Should Churches even be focused on it?
07:26-09:14 Church Marketing Tip #1: Plain-Text Emails
09:14-11:12 Church Marketing Tip #2: Send From Your Pastor
12:12-15:23 Church Marketing Tip #3: Single CTA
15:23-15:52 Church Marketing Tip #3a: Include a PS Section in Email
15:52-18:00 Church Marketing Tip #4: Create a Central Hub Style Website
18:00-20:00 Church Marketing Tip #5: Put your messaging and sermon content online
20:00-20:48 Marketing Your Church to Those not a part of your church
20:48-21:53 Church Marketing Tip #6: Consider Running an Ad
21:53-22:58 Church Marketing Tip #7: Use Short-Form Video Content
22:58-26:19 Church Marketing Tip #8: Create an e-book for your community
26:19-28:28 Church Marketing Tip #9: Captialize on Word of Mouth
28:28- Outro

TRANSCRIPT
Nick Clason (00:00):
Well, hey there everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Hybrid Ministry Show. In this episode, I am going to give you nine church marketing tips. We're just gonna fire through them one by one. However, we're gonna break them up into two different sections. Section number one is marketing tips for people who already considered themselves a part of your church and a part of your congregation. And then the back half. So those are gonna be the first five. The back four are going to be church marketing tips for people who are not yet a part of your church congregation. So, so excited to have you with us. Hey, if this is your first time ever, welcome to the show. Excited to have you. If you don't know, we stream and film every single one of these episodes out to our YouTube channel. So you can grab the link to that in the show notes.

Nick Clason (00:48):
If you're on YouTube and you're like, wait, this is the podcast, yes it is. Hit the link in the show notes and that will take you to hybridministry.xyz. And there will be a specific link that will take you directly to this episode number and will give you completely free access to our transcripts, which is a free resource that we offer for each and every single episode. So make sure that you go and take advantage of that because listen, if you're anything like me, you're on a run, you're cooking dinner, you're walking your dog, and you might hear a thing that you're like, that's interesting. I want to dive deeper into that. And if that is the case, it's often hard and and difficult to do that, you know, when you are on that run, when you're walking that dog, when you're doing those dishes.

Nick Clason (01:29):
So you just make a quick earmark and like, I'm gonna go back, I'm gonna download those transcripts, I can see a little bit more. So that is an opportunity and definitely an option for you. So make sure that you take a look into that and take advantage of that. We're so excited to have you with us. Hey, listen, if you are excited to be here, if you're excited to be listening, it would mean the absolute world to us. If you would share this episode with a friend, it would mean the absolute world with us. If you are going to, if you help us by making a rating or a review, we would be thrilled with those things. Um, it just helps us get the word out. It helps us get indexed and ranked and search. Um, not because we're trying to go big, go viral or go famous, but man, we just, we're passionate about this message and we just really want to get the word out there.

Nick Clason (02:18):
You know what's interesting, before we dive into the church marketing tips, I was at a Bible study last night. Um, if you don't know me, my story, my name's Nick Clason, I'm your host, uh, here every single week with y'all. Um, new episodes drop every single Thursday at four o'clock in the morning. But I'm a youth pastor. I'm a youth pastor in the Dallas Fort Worth metroplex area, um, at a big church for most, but in Dallas it's not super big, uh, cuz everyone goes to church here. But I was at a, a bible study that we do, it's a yearlong bible study on Sunday night, which is not a normal ministry night, and it's for seniors only. So it's creative name called fso. So it's that fso and they're talking about finding a church when you go off to college. And um, it was just interesting cuz like the hybridness of ministry really reared its head in those moments, uh, because they're talking about visiting a church, how often you should visit a church, uh, what if you go in the main pastors, isn't there preaching like how many more times you need to give that church a shot?

Nick Clason (03:20):
And I just was like, guys, um, I was nice, right? But I was like, guys, you don't have to just only attend in person. Like if what you're looking for is the pastor's message and the content. I said Covid has forced just about every single church in America online. So check out their services, check out his preaching, uh, check those things out online, gather some of those data points. And then when, you know, based on what I've heard so far, this church, this church and this church are all options for me, then go visit them in person. So I just wanna say like even in my own life, even in my own realm, even in my own world, hybrid ministry is rearing its head. So encourage you, stick with it, it's important, it matters. There's a world out there of people that are trying to grasp and grab a hold of this message and you just might be the key for some of those people.

Nick Clason (04:09):
So what you do is worth it. What you do matters. And so without any further ado, let's dive in to nine different church marketing tips before we give you marketing tip number one, I just wanna do a quick like 10, 30 seconds, something like that. Little primer on what is marketing. If you Google search, what is marketing? This is a response you're gonna get. It says this, it's the activity or uh, the activity of business, sorry, the activity or business of promoting and selling products or services including market research and advertising. So you might be sitting here thinking like that. Yeah, great, but that's not what the church is supposed to do. And I agree with you mostly, uh, in the traditional sense, like you might think of marketing as a way to make money for a business, and that's true. Um, however, that is not necessarily the church's goal.

Nick Clason (05:03):
Our goal though is to bring about brand awareness and not cause we're a brand, but because we want people to know about our church. So what is your church about? Does your church even exist? Um, and then beyond that, once they do know that you exist, how do you help add value to their lives? And not because we're trying to get their tithe money, though, maybe we are at some point. That's part of the thing. You gotta make money. You know, you gotta, you know, you gotta take people's ties and use that for the overall betterment of the church. And if you don't, the crass reality is that your church that's gonna have to shut their doors. And so at some level you are gonna want that, but that's not the main reason. And you know that, and that's honestly not why you're in this.

Nick Clason (05:48):
Okay? You're in this so that people know about you, know about your church and then make a decision to commit and connect to your church. And with that commitment and connection, especially if that person is far from God and doesn't know Jesus, that's not only gonna come with a decision to join a social gathering and entity, but that's also gonna come with a major crisis of faith and a major faith hurdle decision that they're gonna have to make. So this isn't just, you're like, Hey, do you want to come shop at Walmart? This is, do you wanna give your life to Jesus radically and and forever change everything about that. And then do you want to commit to our social gathering where we help equip you and encourage you in that? And if you've grown up a Christian your whole life, you're like, yeah, that's exactly what this is.

Nick Clason (06:37):
But if this is completely new to you of faith, you're like, that is a lot and it is right? You gotta just keep that in mind like that. There are about 37 things that go into that. And so while our logo and our color scheme matter, we are asking people to do major things in their life. And so what is marketing? It's bringing about awareness of your church. It's adding value to people's lives. It's helping them commit and connect to you and your uh, organization. And then finally it's helping create, um, fans out of them disciples, super fans, people who will give their lives to the mission of Jesus and the mission of your church. So that's just a quick primer on marketing, specifically what is church marketing? But let's dive in now to nine different church marketing tips. Here we go. Church marketing. Tip number one is send emails and send plain text emails to your church.

Nick Clason (07:36):
Now what am I talking about? There's a difference between uh, plain text email, which is just white background, black text. Just like you would send an email to a friend, a coworker or your son or daughter's elementary school teacher, right? And then there are graphically designed newsletters that look amazing. It's what you'd get from Bath and Body Works or Target or Old Navy, right? And they're trying to sell you something. And a lot of times, especially foreign in church communications or foreign church marketing, we have a graphic design skill and we like to use that and show that off. We can make that newsletter if we're honest, look incredibly sexy and sleek and amazing. However, there's been a lot and considerable amounts of research shown. And it goes to show that email marketing is done best in plain text. I have a quote here from a male Munch article is from a blog, it's HTML versus plain text email and they dive deep into it.

Nick Clason (08:30):
I'll add that link there in the show notes if that's something that you're interested in. But their conclusion said this, it can be a pickle to choose one type of email, but here's the secret that no one lets you onto in email. Less is always more so less is more. And I just wanna encourage you don't lose sight of that fact. Less is more. And if less is more, you may get your message across more clearly, more concisely. Two more people. You may get more clicks, you make it more opens. And so I'll just encourage you in your email marketing, if you are doing a graphically designed thing, consider trying and beta testing and AB testing if you will. Send some graphically designed ones and then send some plain text ones and see which perform better. Church marketing tip number two, when sending emails, edit your from section and send the emails from your pastor's name.

Nick Clason (09:25):
There's a very big difference psychologically when you're getting an email from Pastor Todd as opposed to getting an email from Crossroads Church. You see what I'm saying? You're getting an email in one case from a friend, from a person, from a human being, somebody who you know, who you connect with, who you love, and then you're getting an email from an entity or, or an organization and he doesn't have to actually be from Pastor Todd. If Pastor Todd's worried about putting his name on something, then ghost write it for him and then just send it over to him to get a stamp of approval and let him make the final edits and tweaks before you send that out. But you are gonna, you are going to see your email open rates skyrocket when you're doing both plain texts and when you're sending it from Pastor Todd, because think about it, people open their emails and I don't know if you're anything like me.

Nick Clason (10:12):
I open my emails and I see junk, junk, junk, junk, junk. And then there's like one or two things that I'm like, oh, this is from a person, let me read it. And when there's something from a person that's personal, that's different, that's not the same, it's going to peak my interest differently because I actually want an email. Like if I get an email from my grandma or my grandpa, they're checking in on my life. They're trying to see how things are going. Like I don't delete that email, but I delete the Old Navy email. I delete the emails from my kid's school. I delete the emails from frankly my church because they come from not anybody, right? And all I know they are is they're just lists and bullets of announcements. Announcement, announcement, announcement. There's nothing personal in there. And here's the reality, when you are sending an email from a church, it is going to have an announcement flare to it.

Nick Clason (10:59):
So if you can personalize it a little bit more in these two ways by making it plain text, cause that's how you would send an email to a friend and by sending it from your pastor, that's gonna help your open rates skyrocket. Church marketing tip number three, give yourself one singular call to action. Call to action is just a marketing word for what are you trying to get the people that you're communicating with to do what is the one call to action or the one thing, the one action step that you're hoping that they take. Now here's the thing, we will put together a full on smorgasboard of a church newsletter, basically a bulletin board of church email stuff all in one email. And that's why we do these html amazing graphically designed newsletters cuz we can include everything and the kids ministry and the women's ministry and the senior adult ministry in the youth ministry in college of ministry.

Nick Clason (11:56):
And everyone gets their announcement in the church newsletter. And so nobody's left out and nobody has to worry it. But you will see a dramatic rise in calls to action if you give one singular call to action. Now, you might be thinking, wait a minute, you just named like five ministries just off the top of your head, that doesn't even include some of the real ones that I have in my church. How in the heck am I supposed to get all of these things communicated if I'm also only, maybe you're maybe only sending an email newsletter one time a week. Well, we fear this, right? We fear because we are afraid that some people might not know all that's going on. We also are afraid that some people won't get the info that they need. And also for just honest, we live and work in an office culture.

Nick Clason (12:42):
And so there's gonna be awkward vibes if you pick the Kids ministries announcement over the youth ministries announcement and the kids pastor loves you, but the youth pastor now hates you, right? And, and so you got that pressing on you too, and you shouldn't let that be a reason why you do it, but it is, if we're honest, we're all human, right? And so I wanna, um, link, uh, an article for you. Um, I'm gonna read a little excerpt for you, but it's from unlayer.com. It's a blog called Call to Actions and Email. And here's what it says, just a reminder of this, when you are sending to somebody, you're saying, Hey, it's a selfish world out there. And the question that they're asking is, what's in it for me? So here's what it says, what's in it for me? Selfish world out there? Why expect your audience to listen to you, right?

Nick Clason (13:25):
For them to perform your desired action, you need to highlight what's in it for them. So let's take the example of an e-book of reducing debt you're offering as a reward for subscribing to your mail list. Which call to action sounds better, download now or give me financial freedom. So as you're writing these things out, be thinking about how can you offer and provide value to these people's lives? That's what they're saying, right? Like this give me financial freedom button is gonna be a lot more appealing than simply download now because in the back of people's minds, they're thinking, what is in this for me? Now the tricky thing is you're gonna have to get really vigilant with which announcements get promoted where, especially if you're only doing one email a week and one singular call to action. But what I would do is I would choose one thing every single week, the number one thing, and send that out.

Nick Clason (14:17):
And if the entire email is focus on signing up for kids vbs and nothing else is vying for his attention, for people's attention in the email, because it's a plain text email, it's from Pastor Todd and Pastor Todd's inviting you to VBS because he's sharing a story of life change and life transformation that happened at last year's vbs. You can't help but be compelled to be like, give me that same experience and I want to invite my friends, I wanna invite my neighbors into it. And that's the email. But then next week, maybe it's not about kids, maybe it's about youth camp. The next weekend Pastor Todd's doing the same thing in a plain text email because it feels like he's emailing a friend. Narrow your emails down to one singular call to action and then you are as a, this is why you get paid to big bucks as a church communications, a church marketing manager, church, you know, marketing director, whatever your title is, to figure out how to communicate the other elements, the other announcements without just cramming more and more and more and more and more into an email.

Nick Clason (15:24):
Let me give you church marketing tip, bonus tip four or three a, um, in your emails include a PS section. A lot of times we as as, uh, humans, we just skim our emails and we, we skim, skim and then we see a PS boom. Give the same message in the body of your email as you do in the PS of an email. One singular call to action all the way down. Boom. PS don't forget it sounded from vbs. Church marketing tip number four, create for yourself a one-stop shop centralized hub. Uh, this has made famous and I have been on record on here promoting the mess out of them from the guys up at Proach Church Tools in Canada, Brady Shear. Um, and all those guys, they have made famous the idea of a central hub. They call it Nucleus. So you can go ahead to nucleus.church and make that your website's one stop shop.

Nick Clason (16:20):
So every single next step lies on your website. That's gonna help, especially if we are doing these one singular call to action emails where not everything is on your, um, not everything is on your email, but everything is on your website. And so if they go there, it's a full service bar. A lot of times we make it where it's like, Hey, if you wanna send up for vbs, go to the children's lobby and if you wanna sign up for youth camp, go talk to Pastor Doug. And if you wanna sign up for the women's brunch, you need to email Kathy. And if you're interested in the senior adult ministry, make sure that you email Harry. Um, but Harry's not here this week, so email his wife Sue today to make sure that you get, you see what I'm saying? Like we have all these different scattering spots.

Nick Clason (17:05):
The human brain is not wired and frankly not interested in remembering all those specific intricacies. But if you beat it weekly into their head, central hub, central hub, central hub. And listen, don't call it that. One church I worked at was called Liberty Heights Church. And so short lhc, right? And the centralized hub was lhc.life. In fact, we outfitted a whole section in the lobby, um, as like a next steps hub in the lobby, but we called it lhc.life. So both the web URL and the in-person room were all called the same thing. And that was it. We ingrained it from the stage, we ingrained it in our emails, we ingrained it online. lhc.life, lhc.life lhc.life eventually becomes a part of the vernacular. Um, and people know where to go when they're looking for things. Number five, I just wanna remind you, create and put your message content out there somehow.

Nick Clason (18:07):
You may or may not have the live streaming capabilities. Odds are in your church, you're at least using a soundboard. And if you're using a soundboard, you have the ability in most cases, if not with a couple of adapters, you're gonna have the ability to record your sermon audio at a minimum starting there. You can record the sermon audio, you can take that and you can put that on a podcast. Um, and you can be on Spotify, you can be on Apple Music, you can be, um, apple Podcast, all the places that you are gonna want to be on a podcast. If you do have video capabilities, I would recommend posting those to YouTube. And I also, honestly, I recommend doing a direct to camera message anyway. So if you're not pre-filing in some sort of way or, or filming your message content in like a studio type of form, pre-fill it, even if it's just on a phone or whatever, have someone edit that down and post those to YouTube and then leave your live streams as a completely different entity.

Nick Clason (19:04):
So yeah, you may have duplicate content out there, but one's gonna be aimed towards your YouTube audience and one's gonna be aimed towards just your people that are in person, right? And finally, uh, if you have the bandwidth ability margin, brain power, come up with some additional forms of content to supplement your weekend weekly messages. But put your content out there, like I said at the top right, the seniors in FSO trying to figure out where to go. This is going to be a goal mine for people as they're trying to discover your church. And it's also gonna be a goal mine for the people that can't make it every single week or don't make it every single week or aren't in the discipline yet of attending church on a Sunday morning every single week for whatever reason. They're a new believer. They're out late on a Saturday night, they just had a new baby.

Nick Clason (19:51):
So getting up early is hard and getting the baby there. Maybe you don't feel comfortable bringing the baby to the nursery, but let them still feel part of what your church has going on. All right, so what do we do when we are looking to reach people who are not yet considered a part of your church? Let me give this caveat that these are all gonna be digital marketing ideas only, not because your in-person experience doesn't matter. Your in-person experience matters greatly. I'm gonna just give the caveat that you have to crush your in-person experience. And so I'm going to carry in two assumptions with this. Number one that you are doing that, that you are attempting with all your might to make your in-person experience as rock solid as possible. But number two, this is a hybrid ministry podcast. And so I wanna focus on the areas in hybrid space, in digital space to help reach some of the people that are gonna be out there that you want to be bringing into your church.

Nick Clason (20:49):
So with that being said, maybe consider, if you really wanna market to people that are unaware of your church, really maybe consider running an ad. If you go to hybrid ministry.xyz sa slash 0 0 9, episode nine, I talk to Matt who I consider a marketing genius and guru about the step-by-step process of running an ad. Now granted, that was in 2022, and so we may need to revisit that and look at that maybe one day I'll see if I can get him back on the podcast. For those of you who don't know, he was our um, co-host on this show for like the first 12 or so episodes. And then him and I both made cross country moves and, uh, for a lot of different reasons, he did not make that jump back into podcast co-host dumb. Uh, and so maybe one day I'll bring him back on as a special guest to help us walk back through that.

Nick Clason (21:37):
Definitely not my forte. Maybe you personally have some experience doing it, so that'd be great. But if not, if you have no idea what you're doing, head there. Hybrid ministry.xyz/ 0 0 9 for a free look into that. Um, and check out how to run an ad. Number seven, uh, church marketing tip is use short form video content. Short form video content is still king. We talk about it weekly. YouTube shorts, Instagram and Facebook reels and TikTok. All four blowing up right now, all four asking for the same types of content. So create quality content in short form video versions. Post it, put it on your social media channels. And here's the other good news about it, right? Like once you've done one that does well, you can boost that or turn that into an ad. And so that will help also bring about awareness. But just in your general area, TikTok specifically shares geographically in your area first.

Nick Clason (22:34):
And so post in your area, geotag it. And then as people are experiencing and spending time on TikTok, just consuming things for themselves, they may run across on therefore you page something about your church, a video, whether it's spiritual content, fun content, marketing type content, but create some of those short form video pieces for the chance and for the opportunity to go viral. Church marketing idea number eight, this one is next level in my personal opinion. We were doing it at the church. I was at both Matt and I, the co-host I had, like I had just mentioned, um, create an ebook for your community. So one of the things that we started doing was we were creating, uh, a seasonal e-book. And so the first one we did was leading into summer and I think we titled 101 things to do in this area, like South Chicago land in this area for the summer.

Nick Clason (23:29):
And it was aimed at families with younger kids and it just gave them like park ideas, splash pad ideas. It gave them like movie night dates and places that they could go see movies under the stars or you know, whatever. Um, but then what you can do with that is if you're giving away your a right, you're adding value to people if you give some of those things away. The other thing is you can include your stuff in there. So you give them 95 ideas of things all around the community. Splash pads and parks and ice cream cone trails and all those types of things that you either borrow off of or just create, like we created our very own ice cream trail in the South Chicago suburbs area. There wasn't one in existence, but we just brain pooled our heads together, like this place, this place, this place.

Nick Clason (24:14):
It's make an ice cream trail. And then you give them like the family, like a one page tear out, you know, thing that they can use and put in their fridge and they can keep track of all the different ice cream places that they want to go throughout the summer. So you give 'em 95 ideas of just like places around. But then five ideas are your ideas and maybe you like make those colorful, you know, where you print the rest of the ebook and like black and white or whatever, but your pages are full page spreads color, whatever, and you're highlighting your church vbs, you're highlighting your own church movie nights, you're highlighting, you know, whatever stuff you are doing that would, that would be a great place for somebody not connected to your church to make an introductory connection step with your church, with your faith family and with your organization.

Nick Clason (25:03):
And then replicate that. Make a fall one winter one spring one. You see what I'm saying? Um, or it doesn't have to be that, but but think about ways in which you can add value. What you're looking to do in those is you're looking to capture people's emails, name and email. You could and should be able to do that through your church communications, um, or church marketing, uh, database. But those aren't always geared and built for marketing. So I do remember when Matt would work, um, at Parkview we used like the Rock as like a church management software, but Matt was like, I want to use HubSpot and you can do all the same stuff through HubSpot. I don't know if Matt knew all of the things that we needed, um, for like a pastoral side of things with like baptism dates, membership and whatever and whatnot.

Nick Clason (25:52):
But he knew that you could do a lot of stuff with like, um, an actual marketing tool like that. And so, um, you'll, you may have to figure out the best way to do that, to capture those names. Um, it is difficult to find a free email capture list out there, so you will more than likely have to pay for it, but it's worth it, especially if you're saying we wanna reach people who are far from God, who are not connected to our church and help get them connected to our church. The last idea, not necessarily a digital marketing idea, but word of mouth and, and you can take word of mouth and turn it into a digital marketing thing, right? Like when you're encouraging your church congregation to invite people to Easter, give them some shareable Easter graphics that they can download and share on their, their social media platforms.

Nick Clason (26:40):
You know, um, give them some of those tips and tools like, Hey, text us to a friend. Send this to a friend. Post this on your Instagram, post this on your Facebook, you know, whatever. Because that word of mouth, like while all the best ads, e-books, signs, website, like all those best things are valuable, the most valuable. It's when a friend says, Hey, you know what I've been doing recently, going to this church, going to this restaurant, reading this book. I mean, I'll say like, I was listening to a podcast the other day, we're gearing up to go on vacation here in just a couple short weeks. And I was like, I need a book. Like I need to read a book when I'm on vacation. I never do that. I always just read non-fiction books. Someone said, you know, I read such and such book and I'm not a non-fiction reader, but that book was phenomenal.

Nick Clason (27:25):
Or he's not a fiction reader, but that book was phenomenal. That's all I needed to hear. I'm also not a fiction reader. He's a pastor. I'm a pastor. That book's phenomenal. Boom, bought it. I literally got on Amazon and write that moment and bought it. Word of mouth. I have no clue who that author is. I'm sure they did all kinds of book tours, podcast marketing. I didn't listen to a single word of it, but someone else gave a word of mouth reference and boom, I bought it instantly. So think about that. Your people can become a raving fans of your church question, are they willing to be raving fans of your church or are they embarrassed by it? And if it's the latter, I would do some heavy introspection to figure out why that is. Because you want your people to be proud where they go to church so that they tell their friends, then they come, that could be digitally or that could just be very analog in a backyard barbecue scenario when they're at their kids', you know, sporting event, end of season recap or whatever, and they're just talking about stuff.

Nick Clason (28:23):
So those are some nine different church marketing ideas. Hey, hope you found them helpful. So thankful that you stuck around to the very end of this episode. If you did find it helpful, please consider shooting a rating or review alike, a subscribe, any of those things really help the algorithm and we will be forever in your debt as a token of our thanks to you for that, head to our website, hybridministry.xyz, click on blogs, click on the article that says ebook and grab your very own free copy of this e-book. TikTok. Have I already ruined my account? A complete guide, I'm posting your church's TikTok from start to finish. You're the church marketing manager, or you're the pastor and you know you need to make short form video content and you just don't know how to do it or where to turn. Take this e-book ZBook, hand it to a friend, hand it to a student, hand it to a trusted anybody who you're like, Hey, help me out with some of this stuff.

Nick Clason (29:19):
And if they don't know what they're doing, it will be their complete guide to starting from scratch, from start to finish. So hope that you find that helpful and with, again, as always, we're so grateful that you're here. Head to the episode, uh, show notes for all the links to articles and all the different things that we've referenced throughout this, this episode so far. But if you did find it helpful, please consider sharing it with a friend that would mean the absolute world to us. I'm so glad you're here. So glad you're along for the ride. This matters. What you do matters. So don't forget. And as always, stay hybrid.

Follow Along on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9pjecCnd8FVFCenWharf2g

Full Transcript:
http://www.hybridministry.xyz/043

The Spreadsheet with the Metricool Results:
https://www.hybridministry.xyz/articles/metricool

Follow Along on TikTok:
http://www.tiktok.com/@clasonnick

FREE E-Book:
https://www.hybridministry.xyz/articles/ebook

SHOWNOTES
Metricool Posting Service:
http://www.metricool.com

TIMECODES
00:00-01:39 Intro
01:39-08:53 My journey to using a social media posting service
08:53-13:07 The Results from 18 posts used on a social media posting service
13:07-18:30 Breaking down the stats from Metricool
18:30-20:08 3 TakeAways from using a Posting Service
20:08-25:23 What does this mean for social media moving forward?
25:23-26:02 Outro

TRANSCRIPT
Nick Clason (00:00):
One. Well, hello there, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Hybrid Ministry Show. I, as always, am your host, Nick Clason, thrilled and excited to be with you wherever you are consuming this. Whether you are over on YouTube or whether you have found this via your podcast catcher, know that we do offer the other. So if you are on YouTube, you wanna check it out on podcasts, you can head to http://www.hybridministry.xyz If you're just listening to this. And today in particular, I am gonna drop some like visual aid representation stuff on screen as we're chatting through what we're chatting through. You can head over to YouTube today. We are going to talk about a scheduling service. Yes, I have been against this for years and years, and if you have been listening to this podcast, do you know that it has taken a minute for me to ever convert our TikTok account over from a personal to a business?

Nick Clason (00:56):
I've finally made that shift. I will tell you why, and make sure you stick around to the very end of the video for me to give you my final conclusion on whether or not you should be using a scheduling service for your social media. Before we dive in though, let me let you know that we have created a 100% completely free e-book and checklist, and for signing up for our email newsletter, you will get a copy of both of those immediately sent to your inbox. So go ahead, head to the link in the show notes for that. And without any further ado, let's dive in and let's start talking about scheduling services on social media. Here we go. All right, let's talk about scheduling services. Now, if you've listened to this podcast any length of time, you know that I have not really been much of a scheduling service person.

Nick Clason (01:51):
And so let me give you just a little brief history on all of that for me. So, uh, I started really getting into social media and social media scheduling and planning. Every church I've been in, I've had that to some level, some degree, but I've gotten mu I've really honed that in, I would say within the last three ish years. Um, and it dated back a couple churches. I'm trying to think like I really got into trying and experimenting with some stuff. Um, when I was at church in Cincinnati, I was there for a couple of years. Um, and then when I moved to Parkview, which is the church I was at before here, uh, in, in the South Chicago suburbs, I had nothing to do with social media. But then I offered to have something to do with it. Like I took on a portion of it.

Nick Clason (02:46):
And, uh, there is when I really started to hone in on more of what I'm focusing on now, TikTok and reels and stuff like that. And then that's when I met Matt, if you've been around since the beginning, you know, Matt was my co-host, the first, you know, 10 or so episodes. And so, uh, he worked at Parkview with me. Anyway, all that to be said, one of the things I discovered, cuz I had used both at my church in Cincinnati, and at the start of my time at Parkview, I used Hootsuite as a scheduler. And I think Hootsuite is fine as a scheduler, uh, for anything like Instagram feed posts or Facebook posts. Those are fine. The issue was, and I, and it may have changed, and so I may be eating my words a little bit on this. It may have changed since I most recently used it, but it could, when I started really, really taking over social media at my last church, I went to Matt, um, and I said, Hey, is there any way for me to schedule stories and, and reels or tos?

Nick Clason (03:44):
And he said, not really. And then I think within about a month of that conversation, a both of us started our exit strategies out of there, A and b, TikTok, A and Instagram all came out with, uh, schedulers. Okay? And so, uh, about a week or month ago, actually, about a month ago, I had a conversation with another youth pastor friend of mine from Indiana, and he's like, do you know that you can schedule your TikTok? And I was like, what? And so I did dive into it and yes, in fact you can, if you are a business account, you can, uh, schedule TikTok through the TikTok website. And so I was like, okay, interesting. So I started to play around with all these different things and I was like, this might be a game changer. Now let me explain to you what happened and what my journey was to end up where I ended up.

Nick Clason (04:37):
So, uh, you can natively schedule through all four of the core platforms. We're talking about Facebook, uh, which Facebook and Instagram are linked together through the Meta Business Suite, TikTok, and then YouTube. Of course you can schedule on YouTube. Um, but, but none of them, in my personal opinion, are, are optimal. And I'll give you some reasons why. Uh, when I was trying to schedule through the Facebook Business Suite, I personally, our account for whatever reason, wouldn't allow me to schedule Instagram reels. I could schedule Facebook reels, but I couldn't schedule Instagram reels. And so then that sent me on a search and I could do the other ones. I could do TikTok and I could do YouTube. However, I will say YouTube, it's just like you're uploading a regular video. And when I, when I upload on YouTube shorts on my app, it's a completely different interface.

Nick Clason (05:33):
And so, honestly, half the time I wasn't sure if I was doing it right because I'm like, is this where I put the caption? Is this where I put the title? And YouTube shorts are still a little weird and they're, I think they're still trying to figure out what they're doing over there. Um, they have put a lot more time and effort and energy into it. And so it's getting better for sure. Um, but YouTube has actually been my number one, uh, culprit, uh, downfall in all this. Anyway, I'll get to all that in a second. Uh, so I went, I searched through all these things, discovered and landed on a platform called Metro. Cool. I'll drop the link in the show notes. It might be helpful, it might be useful for you. Check it out. I can't make a blanket statement and say like, you should do this, you should do that.

Nick Clason (06:13):
I'm just gonna give you my experience and then what I would recommend if you were consulting or asking me. Um, but you might not be. And so you might be like, oh yeah, that totally works for me. Uh, but I landed on this thing called Metric Cool. I could link all four of those services, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube shorts. I could link all four of those and I could post auto post to all of those. I could schedule it ahead of time and then it would post on its own when I, I said to post it. Okay? And so I was like, this is going to change my life. And so let me tell you the results, the stats and how it all went down, uh, on metric. I used it for two and a half weeks. I posted a total of 18 videos on that time.

Nick Clason (07:00):
And, uh, the reason I didn't use, you know, post every single piece of content that I was planning to post is cause I had some TikTok sitting in my TikTok drafts. I had some that had, I had, uh, like recaps that I hadn't even filmed yet that I couldn't like preschedule. And I was like, I'll just take care of these live. Also, metrical is free for up to, um, what was it I I calculated that was free for up to like 30, uh, days. Um, not like a trial, but like 30 days worth of posts. Um, but however, it's like if I posted Instagram reels and Facebook and TikTok a and YouTube, that counts as four. So it was like, it was more than 30, it was like 120 I think. Um, but if I post on four of those four 30 days, then I'm going to use them all up, right?

Nick Clason (07:49):
And so that was another reason I didn't schedule everything. Cause I was like, I can leave some gaps in here, uh, to save back some of their, their free, you know, posting stuff, whatever. Anyway, I digress. So I used it. Um, and the reason I used it right was because I couldn't figure out a way to do Instagram and, uh, real scheduling and all these things. The other thing is I liked it cuz it's all in one, right? If I was gonna do all the native schedulers, I'd have to have like three tabs open and do TikTok and then go over to YouTube and then go over to the meta business suite. Possible doable and definitely worth my time if that takes away from me having to schedule live, you know, live posting. And so, um, finding this was, I was really exciting moment for me.

Nick Clason (08:35):
And so I, like I said, I went all in. I was like, let me try this thing and see what happens. So I'm gonna give you the results here. Let's dive in and look at the actual nitty gritty stats. And this is where, if you're listening, you may wanna switch over to YouTube, um, and see some of these things cuz I'm just gonna, um, screenshot my spreadsheet and put it on the screen. So here we go. Okay. Like I said, I, uh, uploaded and used metrical for 18 different posts over the course of about two and a half to three weeks. Um, I posted on all four platforms, morning, evening, and night. And here were some of the results that I came up with. So, uh, let's just go, uh, one by one through each platform. So on TikTok, like I said, I posted 18, here were our watch results.

Nick Clason (09:22):
1 63, 1 44, 141, 1 77, 1 52 91, 2 21, 1 49, 1 50, 1 28, 1 35, 1 40, 1 40, 1 48, 1 40, 1 53. Those are low for us. Um, we typically, um, and we don't go super viral on TikTok. I'll just be honest. I honestly, I think we started at a time where TikTok is kind of choking down the watches. And um, you know, like I mentioned Matt, he even said something to me interesting. He's like, I think TikTok might know you're church and if they know you're a church, he's like, I don't know that they're gonna give you a ton of organic reach, which was an interesting thing. Um, so he was saying that even back when I was at Parkview that it might not be, you know, that might be some of the case. So anyway, um, we, you know, we typically live in the two 300 s and then we'll pop, you know, for some over a thousand or whatever here and there. Uh, so the average TikTok wa uh, watch analytics of my metrical posts were an average of 122.

Nick Clason (10:24):
The highest I got was 2 21 and I had two tied for the lowest at 41. So not great. Okay? Um, Instagram reels, this is what we did on Instagram reels 2 51 8 5 19 3 18, 1 38, 1 46, uh, 2 53, 2 1 45. There was one that didn't post cuz there was an error that happened actually a couple different times. I had to go in and manually redo it. That's another story for another day. 2 2 3 2 0 2 180 6, 1 34, 3 94 for an average, uh, view of 1 68. And so our highest was that one of five 19, which was the third one that we posted. And then we had three that were tied with only two views. So again, not great, we did have some perform better. And I will say this, um, between TikTok and Instagram reels, we go, we have much higher views on Instagram reels than we do on TikTok, but I think we have less engagement on Instagram than we do on TikTok.

Nick Clason (11:27):
And so it's, it's, you know, watch isn't isn't equal to engagement and engagement is a loose term, I get it. But that's comments, that's shares, that's likes those types of things. Uh, Facebook reels. Interestingly, and this was really helpful for me, and I'll share some of this in a minute with some of my takeaways, but Facebook was actually quite a beneficial, uh, it was quite beneficial for me to go back and look on Facebook. Honestly, I had it and just let it do its thing. Um, and I never really go back to Facebook to engage much, but we had some decent traction on Facebook, surprisingly, and as a youth pastor, not necessarily my goal, right? Uh, we're probably catering to and reaching parents over there. Um, which might be a good thing, might be a bad thing. I don't know. Like, I don't have like a stance on whether or not, you know, I'm happy with that or whatever.

Nick Clason (12:15):
But we did quite well on Facebook. So here's what we had on Facebook. 1 92, 62 18, 3 38, 98 4 19, 2 24, 2 57, 2 62, 1 98 42, 2 0 6, 1 93, 3 78 39, 180 9, 2 0 3. Average view of two 18 with our highest being four 19, our lowest being 39. And then finally on shorts, this is where it got bad. 4 0 7 7 4 15, 2 3 17, 6, 6, 8, 6, 3, 2, 2, 1 for an average view of 5.4 highest 17 lowest zero. So let's extrapolate and look at some of the takeaways from all of this. What does this mean? All right, so what does all of this mean? Should you schedule? Should you not, should you use metric? Cool. Here's, here are my personal takeaways. So you need to know this. I'm not using it anymore. Like what it did to us on YouTube was, was horrific. Um, and I'm not blaming metrical necessarily, right? But I I, after a couple of days I started screenshotting some of these things to my, um, free under the table consultant, Matt, Matt Johnson, former co-host of the podcast.

Nick Clason (13:36):
May he rest in peace. Uh, but anyway, I was like, bro, what's going on here? And he's like, yeah. He's like, I was worried about that for you. Cuz they, those platforms, they, they don't typically like you using third party services. So these third party services, they may be able to tap into the api, uh, and, and like allow you this, this may be a thing that they're able to actually allow happen. But basically what he was saying is he's like, I don't know that that is your optimal strategy moving forward. Kind of a bummer because it's easy for you or me as a social media manager, but it's more difficult. Um, you know, and your views might go down. And so you have to weigh out like what's more valuable. And honestly, there is a moment where it being easier for you, especially if you're going to post at the volume that I have recommended you do.

Nick Clason (14:26):
Uh, that's a lot. And so sometimes you're like, I don't wanna have to always be thinking and remembering to like get on there and live post everything. I don't wanna have to input every single thing into to Google Calendar. You know, like I used to put every single thing into Google Calendar to remind myself to post, honestly. Now I just kind of know like, oh, I gotta post three. And so I, I go to just like a picture I took of like a calendar that I wrote it all out on and I just go off of that. I don't even have anything alerting me cuz it's so woven into my rhythm and habit of just posting. So anyway, here are some of my observations. First observation is this. Not one single video across all four of the platforms was like highest. Like, it's not like this video performed well and it performed well across all four.

Nick Clason (15:15):
Like when I say the highest performing one, like the highest performing one overall, um, I think was the, the Instagram reels one. And that was one about Fruity Pebbles, right? Meanwhile on TikTok it was, it only got a hundred views on Facebook reel, it got 218 and on YouTube shorts I had four. Then my lowest overall video was the one that got zero plays on on YouTube shorts, but it got 260 on Facebook, eight on Instagram reels and 144 on TikTok. So it, it's a lottery ticket we've talked about, right? Like you punch it in all four places because it might perform well over here and not well over there. And so similarly, the highest on Instagram, I could read you those same like stats across the line. And, and the same thing, like it's not the best performing video overall, it's just simply the best performing video on that platform.

Nick Clason (16:10):
The other observation I had was that, uh, of my overall, um, analytics, Facebook had the best watches and YouTube had the worst watches, okay? In the midst of this, like I said, right, I used it for 18 posts. In the midst of this, I did have a video that had 300 or 3000, um, 556 views on TikTok. And that was posted in the middle of this run of me using Metrical for two and a half weeks. It wasn't one of the metrical videos, it was one that I posted live. Cuz it was one of those that is like, um, it splits the room in two and you got a bunch of people and you decide like, do you know this song? Do you not know this song? If you know it, go to this side of the room and sing it. If you don't walk over here in shame and then it'll change to another song.

Nick Clason (16:54):
And if you know that one, you can move over to the room, but if you did know this one before, you have to move back over here. It was one of those and it went well for us, and we're gonna do more of those and, and shoot more of those and post more of those because it worked for us. And who knows, it may be a thing that we can lean into more. Uh, or it was just a one-off. You never know how those, how those work, right? So we're just gonna try some stuff. Um, my Facebook views remained consistent. It, I saw no appreciable difference between before Metric Cool after metric, cool during metric, cool. Whether I posted it via Metric cool, or whether I posted it manually. My Facebook views pretty much remained the same. Um, this was the most disheartening one before I started using Metrical.

Nick Clason (17:37):
Like right before I had videos within a week or 10 days of posting on YouTube shorts that got 2,400 views, 1,400 views and 634 views. There were some other smaller ones in there, right? But I had some pretty hefty and big views on YouTube shorts since posting on metrical, like pulling the plug and being like, I'm not using this anymore. The highest I've gotten on YouTube shorts is 49. I've had the majority of my views in single digits and I've had several with just no views at all. And so that's disheartening. And I have to, I have to start back over basically on YouTube shorts and I may have dinged myself permanently, um, or at least for a really long time by using Metric. All right, so three takeaways. What does this mean? So three takeaways. As of right now, I'm back to posting everything manually.

Nick Clason (18:37):
I'm not using the service scheduling service anymore. Perhaps, uh, that's takeaway number one. Takeaway number two, perhaps the native schedulers would, would be more advantageous. You know, I'm assuming if TikTok has a scheduler built into their website that they're gonna, um, promote and prioritize that more than they would like just a third party service like Metrical. Um, but like I said, right now I need to focus on growing our YouTube engagement back. And so therefore it's for me, I'm an all or nothing kind of person, so I could, yes, I know you're think you're listening, watching, like why don't you just schedule on on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok, again, remember Instagram, I couldn't figure out a way to schedule. So for that one it would be like, I can schedule for Facebook and TikTok, but then I need a live post for Instagram and YouTube.

Nick Clason (19:29):
It just, it, I I I would rather do it all at the same time, um, to just know, like I post all four, boom, boom, boom, boom, and I'm done. And when I say all four, I only need to post in three places. I need to do TikTok, I need to do Instagram and make sure Facebook is toggled on, and then that's taken care of. And then I need to go do YouTube. So when I say four, it's three. It's still a lot, but it's not, you know, as many as that sounds. Uh, the other thing, the other, the third takeaway for me is it's definitely tedious work, but a non bot scheduling still has proven to be the best for engagement for me, for us, and for our ministry. So, big picture, um, I have been for years, um, and on this podcast, if you go back and listen, I have been promoting two to three posts per day, five to seven days a week.

Nick Clason (20:21):
And that's a hefty content load. Uh, one, a couple things like, you know, just let you know, I, so for example, I have like a lot of games over on D y m. Um, I'll link some of those in the show notes if that's something you're interested in going, checking out. But like some of my favorites are like a gif flashback game. You watch a gif for five to seven seconds and then you're asked a question about it to immediately recall it. Another one, my all-time favorite is called emoji phraseology and it's like emoji phrases. And so I have these emojis come in animated. And so one of the things we've been doing is I've just been taking those games and we've been playing them. Um, they're 10 questions each, but I use them as one singular piece of content. And so I, I film someone playing the game or someone trying to guess the emoji phrase, but then that also like all the animations or all the like icons or whatever, all on the screen, all at that same time, so the viewer can also watch it.

Nick Clason (21:18):
And so those have really proven helpful. Those and other like I've, I've gone on D Y M and gotten other games and just had like, film students playing those games. Like those each usually come with 10 questions and I can edit those down to be like one TikTok with 10 questions each. But I've decided to extrapolate those out. We've done that with other things. Like we've used like an ABC cheese game where you bite cheese, you know, and then make a letter and the other person has to guess. And instead of, I originally shot that with the intent of it being like a one, a one hitter, but it took so long and I was like, there's a lot of like funny laugh moments and like silly things happening in between that. Like I didn't want to cut those all out and I could use, I could go from one to 10 and that can really help flesh out my calendar.

Nick Clason (22:05):
So I've done that. Um, and that's proven pretty helpful for me in helping fill out that calendar. But all that being said, I'm personally debating on scaling back a little bit after. Um, currently I'm in the month of April. This may drop in May, but I'm currently in the month of April planning out my TOS and Instagram reels and stuff like that. And I'm doing three a day and I'm personally thinking maybe I can scale this back a little bit. Um, and scaling it back will help me on the edit side not have to be so frantic and quick with everything. Um, and then I might be able to focus more on quality content instead of necessarily quantity. Um, I've been doing two to three for about six to eight months now at this point. And so our platforms are sort of leveled out, stabled out.

Nick Clason (22:49):
We've grown, we've reached the people we need to reach. Now that we're there, maybe we can focus more on bringing like some quality content. And again, I'm the editor and in a lot of cases I'm on this side of the camera too. Like I am the person doing the talking as well. And so, um, you know, I I focus a lot of timer energy on one side or the other. And so that might mean if I'm focusing more energy on the editing side, I'm not focusing as much effort on the content delivery side. And that also needs to be really good too. The editing needs to be good, the content needs to be good. And so you can't have all, you know, you can't have all those things if uh, all those things need to be good. You can't have so many and a great edit and great content.

Nick Clason (23:29):
Sometimes you just gotta throw out not so great stuff. So I'm wondering about scaling it back a little bit and I'll let you know right on here. Like, you guys will be the first to know. I will be honest with you all the way through. I'll take you with me on the journey. Like I want, if you guys have questions, like I want this to be a place where like I just workshop what I'm doing and you're hearing what I'm doing. Um, however, lemme say this, going back into the analytics, um, on all my platforms was actually encouraging and helpful to me because I thought that this third party service metric flopped and tanked me and on YouTube it for sure did. But I, like, I hadn't looked at a single one of those Facebook stats until last night when I was preparing for this episode.

Nick Clason (24:12):
And so it was helpful for me. And let me just say this as a guiding principle, not for social media only though it definitely count, but also for other areas. Go back and look at the stats. I mean that's honestly, that's one of the things about journaling, right? Is like if you journal, you can go back and you can see this is what I prayed about a year ago and here's where I am now. And it's a completely different moment than you were even a year ago, you know, but where you are right now feels overwhelming and crazy and whatever the case might be. And so go back and look and remind yourself. That's why the Israelites often built monuments. They could go back, they could look and they could be reminded of where they were and then they could see how God had been faithful to them, to his people and how they could continue to take steps forward closer to him.

Nick Clason (25:02):
So that's just what I wanna say is help, what was helpful for me, I need to do that more. I'm always looking ahead, rarely looking back. So I just wanna encourage you, if that's something that's helpful, try and find a way to bake that into your regular rhythm as a social media manager, as a youth pastor, as a pastor, whatever your role is as you navigate this. But I just wanna remind you that what you're doing matters. You are trying to reach the people of God, um, and the people who are maybe even far from God through the means and methods that God and, and the world has allowed us. We can use these things to help spread the good news of the gospel. So blessings on you, blessings on your ministry as you continue on this. And as always, don't forget, stay hybrid.

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SHOWNOTES
6 PART CHURCH SOCIAL MEDIA FRAMEWORK:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLngXlSr64YaIbzg_DNJrTrCtBHQnxcOVo

Episode Referenced:
https://careynieuwhof.com/episode549/

TIMECODES
00:00-02:24 Intro
02:24-05:15 Everything you do is Marketing
05:15-08:03 Every Touch Point Matters - Church Marketing from Street to Seat
08:03-11:51 The Reality of Hybrid - Beyond Street to Seat
11:51-15:40 What "est" is your church?
15:40-1643 Outro

TRANSCRIPT
Nick Clason (00:01):
Well, hello there everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Hybrid Ministry podcast. We are now officially finished with the six part church social media framework. Be sure to head to the link in the show notes, either http://www.hybridministry.xyz/041 for this episode of the Hybrid Ministry Podcast. Or if you're watching on YouTube, be sure to check out the link in a description where we have linked the full and complete hybrid ministry church, social media, six part framework, four churches in 2023. We walk through setting up a platform all the way at YouTube through TikTok, through Instagram, through Facebook, linking all of your accounts, how to use email, text, messaging, website, and then finally, how to put all those together for a completely full free and flushed out church social media framework. We hope that you find that helpful, advantageous, beneficial. Just wanna say thank you for watching.

Nick Clason (01:02):
Thank you for sharing. Uh, the month of February and March have been our two highest downloaded months in the entire history of the podcast. We could not do what we are doing without you, so, so thankful that you are along for the ride and for the journey. One major piece of the church social media framework is short form video content. That's the beautiful thing with YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. All four of them right now are focusing on short form video content. And so I wanna encourage you, if you have not hit the link in the show notes to check out our 100% completely free ebook, our ebook, which asks the question, have I already ruined my, ruined my church's TikTok account? The short answer to that is probably not, but we wanna help you walk through taking a step-by-step approach to filming, posting, editing, adding audio, all the things that you need to do for short form video content.

Nick Clason (01:52):
And you can do that right in the TikTok app. And then you can take that same video and you can disseminate it out to all the other social media platforms. Once again, so thrilled that you are here for this episode. In this episode, we are going to be looking at Starbucks. Does Starbucks actually market more on that in just a minute? Last thing I just wanna ask you for is if you are available, interested or willing to give us a five star review, that will be incredible. A subscribe, a rating or review. All of those things help get the word out about what we are doing here on this podcast to help you get out to the masses and the people who are along for this journey, and also trying to navigate this church communications, church social media landscape of 2023. Without any further ado, let's dive into this question.

Nick Clason (02:39):
Does Starbucks Market? Hey everyone. I was recently listening to a podcast the other week, um, and I'm gonna link it in the show notes. It was with Bill McKendry. He is the, um, the guy kind of behind the, um, Jesus ads that you might have seen in the Super Bowl, the ads. Um, he gets us and he was on with Carrie Newk, who is a prolific author, podcaster, blogger in the Christian kind of Roman space and in leadership. And they were talking about, um, marketing, the whole idea of marketing. And so there's just so many good things in that episode. If you haven't listened to it or list or heard it yet, check the link in the description. But one of the things he said really stood out to me, and I kind of want to, um, dive into that a little bit deeper, especially with a lens and an eye for and towards church, um, marketing and church spaces.

Nick Clason (03:27):
And so he said he had a conversation with Howard Schultz of Starbucks, and he said that, um, everybody, this is what Howard Schultz, the guy of Starbucks, I said, everybody assumes that branding and marketing is all about advertising. It's not right. And he goes on to say, if you think that branding and marketing are just about advertising, then you really don't understand branding at all. So you might be thinking like, what is he even talking about? And the the reality is, is that what McKenzie Cano is pointing out to to new H on the podcast is he says, you don't see a lot of Starbucks ads or commercials, do you and Kerry Newhouse's like, no, I guess you're right. I I don't really see a lot of those things. And McKendry goes, that's because of this guy Howard Schultz. He says, every single thing you do is branding.

Nick Clason (04:10):
Every single thing you do lends itself toward marketing. And so you might be thinking as a church like, well, that sounds great. That sounds amazing actually, cuz we don't have a giant budget. And you know what actually it is. But if you are a church with a small budget and you don't have someone with an eye for this or someone who has the intentionality towards what Howard Schultz of Starbucks is actually doing, it's going to be difficult for you in my personal opinion. And so, um, I wanted to think through what Starbucks actually does, like what they consider a successful, um, encounter, a successful opportunity. And so if every single thing you do is marketing, if every single thing you do is branding, that means that every single touchpoint matters. And so what McKendry was pointing out to New H in the podcast is he was saying, that's why Starbucks cups look so cool.

Nick Clason (04:56):
That's why there's such a particular way that every Starbucks is, uh, required by corporate to be laid out. That's why the music is a certain level. That's why the vibe looks a certain way. All of that stuff matters. And so I just wanna kind of pause and think through that, through the lens and through the eyes of the church. So if every single touchpoint matters, let's think about somebody visiting, coming to, um, exploring your church for the very first time. Um, let's think through they are going to be going from the street to the seat. So what are all of the touchpoints between the street and to the seat? So when they pull in the signage that they see the way your parking lot looks, how upkept is your, are your ground? Do you have a parking lot team? Do you have signage for visitors?

Nick Clason (05:43):
Flash your lights if you're a visitor, honk your horn If you're a visitor, do you have people with signs? Do you have greeters? Once they finally park their car and they get out, how are they greeted? Are your greeters just glorified door holders that a lump of, uh, block of wood could also accomplish their job? Or are your greeters actively looking for new guests, actively greeting people standing at the door, keeping the door propped open? You know, more than just standing there and saying, hello sir, hello ma'am. But like, are they using names? Are they trying to get to know people? Are they helping escort new people to the lobby? What does your lobby look like? What's your guest experience in the lobby look like? Do you have a newcomers welcome kit or anything like that? Are you just gonna give them a mug, which is what every single church in America does?

Nick Clason (06:30):
Or are you giving them some sort of tailor-made thing that's gonna be maybe a little bit more beneficial or advantageous to them as a family? Um, how is the kids' check-in process as a dad of young kids? The kids' check-in process when it's assumed that you know what's going on is an absolutely awful experience. So what does that experience look like for people who have no idea what they're doing? Is it clear where they're supposed to go? What do they do if they're new? How do they fill out the information needed to get a kid checked in? How long does that process actually take? Is it clear where they're supposed to go? Is your room, are your room layouts clear? Is your building clean? Does your kids' area seem safe? Do you have safety? Do you have security? Do you have people with branded t-shirts for your church and all the way through finally walking into the auditorium?

Nick Clason (07:20):
How does you know the, how does the bulletin look? How does the actual auditorium look? How do the screens look? How, like, think about the all of that and this like, this is leaning a little bit. Guest services, I get it right? And I'm, I'm doing that all with the, the purpose. But like, but I want you to think about this. When is the last time that you walked through your church building through looking through the lens and eyes of a first time guest, someone who has no idea, no context, no framework for what it's like being in your church? That's what I want to encourage you to do. I want you to encourage you to think about those things. And then the reality is this, is that if every single touchpoint matters, think about all the opportune touchpoints that we just walked through. So let's talk about the reality of hybrid.

Nick Clason (08:07):
This is the hybrid ministry podcast after all. And a lot of times we focus on digital because I think most churches do actually do a decent job at least having their, their mind or their eyes set on the physical or thinking about and thinking through what a physical experience is going to look like for somebody coming to your church newcomer or someone who's been going to your church for a hundred years. But what does your pre street to seat experience look like? See, the reality is most churches do have someone thinking street to seat. They have someone thinking guest services, they have someone thinking worship team, tech team, kids team. Like you have someone thinking about that, whether they're doing a good job or not. That may be a whole nother story. But what about before they ever even determine they're going to come to your church?

Nick Clason (08:54):
Because here's the god honest truth, most people are not just driving by at a Sunday morning at 8 45, 9 o'clock, whatever time they would need to be driving past your church and be like, you know what we should do? We should go to church. Like they're going to come to that decision over a, a sequence of weeks, months. Um, and maybe it's from driving by your church, maybe it's from seeing an ad. Maybe it's from seeing t-shirts that people are wearing of your church in and around the community. Maybe it's just a word of mouth recommendation, any sort of thing. But the, the fact is, once someone that has narrowed in their focus on your church, they have gotten to that conclusion and they have come to that place for one reason or another. What was that reason? And then, and then here's what they're gonna do.

Nick Clason (09:44):
If they're under the age of 35 or 40, probably they're more than likely going to check your church out online everywhere. Your website, your socials, your livestream, your kids' ministry page, all those types of things. I'll give you an example. A couple weeks ago it was March Madness and my wife, um, and I were watching March Madness. Let me be more clear. I was watching March Madness and I was trying to get her interested in March Madness. And there was a commercial about wings from Wingstop, which I'm not a big Wingstop guy, it's very, um, commercial. It's very chain. That's not my thing. I don't love Wingstop, don't love beat up. I love like a good kinda like dive bar wing place. That's, that's typically my preference when it comes to wings. And so my wife was like, you know, sounds good Wings. And I was like, I mean, yeah, wings always sound good to me, but for that night wings sounded good to her.

Nick Clason (10:37):
And so she started googling in our town Best Wings in our Town and started getting all these recommendations, Yelp, Google Maps, five stars, four stars, four and a half stars, whatever. And we found this little bar that served wings that were supposedly pretty good. And so we start researching that, researching the wings, and then we're like, okay, is this gonna be a place that like, is kid friendly? Like can we bring our kids to this bar? Is that gonna be okay? And so we start like researching that and reading through the reviews and reading through what people say. My point in saying all of that is that before we ever stepped foot in that restaurant, we did all kinds of different research. Not a ton, right? But like five to 10 minutes worth of research about wings, about the environment, about the prices, about the menu, all those things before we ever took our step into the, um, the bar.

Nick Clason (11:31):
And so I just wanna say that, and I just want to encourage you as a church to start thinking greater than street to seat. Every single touchpoint that you offer from your church matters. If that's what Starbucks does, which is the largest coffee chain in America, then your church can probably learn a couple of things from Starbucks. Another thing that was fascinating from the episode that I want to point out here before we wrap it up is that he went on to talk about this marketing and branding firm that works with all kinds of different competitors. And he used the example of Walmart and Target and he said, each and every competitor, each and every store, each and every entity, whatever it is, can only have one e s T. And when he said e s t, he said, for example, like Walmart is the cheapest and Target is the coolest.

Nick Clason (12:20):
But I just wanna ask you a question. Is Walmart always the cheapest? Sometimes Target is actually cheaper than Walmart, but you could, you, and he uses this example in the podcast. He says, there's a guy who's like, I, I would throw on slippers and a hoodie and not wash or wash my hair, brush my teeth, anything like that, just head into Walmart and grab something quick. But if I wanna go to Target, I gotta get myself ready, right? Why is that? He said, because each of those places have embraced what their e s t is Walmart being cheapest, target being coolest. So what is that for your church? You probably have something in mind, whether you've thought about it or not, um, spoken or unspoken, just about every place has an E s T that they want to be. What we often run into as agencies, churches, whatever, is that we want to be multiple of them.

Nick Clason (13:09):
Well, we wanna be the coolest and we wanna be the cheapest and we want, you just can't be that. You have to pick one of those things and really hone in on it. So is your church gonna be the church that's all about worship or is your church gonna be the church that's all about kids and student ministry? Or is your church gonna be the church that's all about ex expositional, expository preaching? Is your church gonna be the trendy church? Is your church gonna be the church with good coffee? Is your church? You see what I'm saying? And like, those things matter, but like one thing often rises above and rises to the top of what your church is. And and this is true of businesses and whatnot. And here's the thing. He used an example in the podcast. He says, Southwest Airlines always said, we love you, we love our customers.

Nick Clason (13:52):
And he said, that works until it doesn't. And when Southwest had their debacle around Christmas and they couldn't get people home for their Christmas and family gatherings, no amount of messaging, no amount of like, we love you, we are the airline oven for the people. None of that mattered. He said anymore why? He was like, because they failed. Like they dropped the ball big time and people didn't feel that love sitting in the airport for 24, 36, 48, 72 hours. That is not the messaging that Southwest was giving across during those times. And so you can say what you are, but then you also have to turn around and deliver it. And so everything you do about your church, every single touchpoint that you make, it matters. So what are you going to do? What is that, that key core marker that you're going to be with your church?

Nick Clason (14:41):
And listen, I would, I would recommend if you're a youth pastor, if you're a church communications person, a church social media person listening to this podcast, you're probably gonna wanna have to have a sit with some upper level leadership around this conversation. If you're not a person at the table to have that conversation, ask your direct report. Hey, what, like, how, how can we come up with this? And your church may already have had some of those things. So then go back through and grade those things. Hire a secret shopper, like all sorts of different things. But I like, I just, I wanna point out that I think most churches do a good job, a decent job, you know, with people like secret shoppers, first time guests, all those things. But what are you communicating beyond the doors, beyond the Sunday morning, beyond your primary meeting experience?

Nick Clason (15:26):
And what is your messaging to them? Because if, well he said the Starbucks guy, everything you do is branding, then have you taken enough time to distill that one to your primary core, what your messaging is going to be? Well, thanks everyone for hanging out again for another episode in the Books Hybrid Ministry episode 41. We are now only about 15. No, that's a less than that. We're like 11, 10, 11 episodes away from one year worth of podcasting. So we'll do something exciting on episode 52. I'll need to look, cuz I have a couple bonus episodes that have dropped that have, you know, kind of messed with our, our numbering there or whatever. But, but super excited to be with you, grateful that you're continuing to be along in the journey. Hey, if you have questions, if you wanna get in touch with me, follow me on YouTube, follow me on TikTok, hit me up in the dm, head to our website, hybridministry.xyz. We would love to hear from you. We would love to start answering some questions. So if you have those, send them our way. But once again, thrilled that you were here with us and we will talk to you next time. And don't forget, and as always, stay hybrid.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT: http://www.hybridministry.xyz/037
YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9pjecCnd8FVFCenWharf2g
TIKTOK: https://www.tiktok.com/@clasonnick
FREE EBOOK: https://www.hybridministry.xyz/articles/ebook

SHOWNOTES
How to Run a Successful Ad: https://www.hybridministry.xyz/009

TIMECODES
00:00-03:35 Introduction
03:35-09:00 Facebook.. Does Gen Z care about Facebook?
09:00-15:11 The History of Facebook and what it is today
15:11-18:36 Reason 1) Create a Facebook Page
18:36-20:59 Reason 2) Link your Facebook & Instagram Accounts
20:59-24:00 Reason 3) Create a Facebook Group
24:00-25:55 Outro

TRANSCRIPT
Nick Clason (00:02):
Well, hello everybody. Welcome back to another episode in addition of the hybrid ministry show. My name is Nick Clason. I, as always, I'm your host, excited to be with you. And in this episode, we are going to be diving into our third platform that you should be focused on as a church in building out the six step framework for social media or churches in 2023. Now, this one, um, is gonna be a little bit of a zig or a zag because my guess is if you, uh, know me, you know my story. I am a youth pastor and so I'm gonna be, I do this a lot from the realm of and um, position of being a youth pastor. And so this one you're gonna be like, wait a minute, what is he recommending before? What other one? Cuz you know, so far we've done YouTube and we've also done TikTok.

Nick Clason (01:01):
And so probably your assumption would be that we would be moving on to Instagram and if I were to rank platforms in the order of importance, it would go TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and then Facebook. But today we are going to talk about Facebook and there's a few reasons why and we're gonna get to that. So make sure you stick around to the very end of the episode cuz we're gonna talk about the three primary reasons why you should start with Facebook as opposed to Instagram, especially if you're starting from scratch. And those three reasons are also relevant and prevalent. If you are already on both of those platforms. There's just gonna be some things and, uh, some technical, uh, linking things that you're gonna need and want to do that are gonna help you optimize your performance on both of those platforms, Instagram and Facebook.

Nick Clason (01:49):
All right, um, real quick, let's talk about, uh, before we dive in, you know, too much. I want to remind you, you can head over to our YouTube channel. If you are listening on a podcast, hit the link in the show notes and give us a subscribe there that would help us out tremendously. If you're discovering us and watching us on YouTube, hit the link in the show notes over to hybrid ministry.xyz. That is the homepage and home base for our podcast. And every single episode, including this one, which will have a link to the show notes, has a fully flushed out transcript. So you can go and you can grab the fully flushed out transcript for this episode and any of our past episodes as well as that's where you can get the free download called, have I already Ruined my Church's TikTok account?

Nick Clason (02:32):
And that is your complete guide to handing your phone to someone and say, Hey, post me a TikTok. And if they have no idea what they're doing, that will walk them through step by step. All of that is available, um, in our show notes. That's also available on our website. So give us a subscribe, give us a rating or a review, we would love it. And follow us in all the places. I personally, uh, am on TikTok and I am on YouTube and I'm trying to grow on both of those places to just the word out to help more people like you, church content communicators, church social media managers, youth pastors, part-time college students who got handed a phone from your pastor and said, Hey, we should probably be on social media. Yes, I am here to help you. And that is my entire goal is to help show you one of the ways that you can approach this in your church, in your life and in your ministry.

Nick Clason (03:24):
So without any further ado, let's hop into this episode of Facebook, the platform that Gen Z doesn't care about or do this. All right, so Facebook, does Gen Z care about Facebook? So there was an article back in 2015, um, by Pew Research that found that 71% of teenagers from the age 13 to 17 say that they used Facebook. And at that time they easily beat out platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat. That's an encouraging number. And so for a lot of youth pastors, a lot of people working with Next generation, a lot of people doing social media, um, it kept the impetus and the importance of making Facebook a priority, making it something that you continually should be investing in. All right? However, back in 2022, which is not that long ago, from the drop of this, uh, podcast or the drop of this videos only a year or so ago, it tells us a different story.

Nick Clason (04:26):
So that number in 2015 was at 71%, but it has now dropped to that same age demographic. 13 to 17 year olds is now dropped to 32%. Then you might be thinking then like, why in the world are we making this a priority? Obviously it's tapering off with younger people, it's really only relevant for older generations. And while our church may have a good crop of people in older generation who are still using and active on Facebook, the reality is like that is dropping more and more. And that is true, and I will a hundred percent affirm you. And if you do decide that you don't want to take on Facebook as a platform, I totally get that. Um, especially if you wanna trend younger and be more relevant. Because the reality is this is like even Gen Z, or I'm sorry, gen X, uh, millennials, boomers, they use some of the other platforms that we're talking about here.

Nick Clason (05:16):
They're active on YouTube, some of them probably do have a TikTok account. And so if you want to abandon Facebook altogether, you can. The thing is, reality is probably you as a church, you probably already have a Facebook account. It's already probably been established and it's probably been active for years. And so what do you do and how do in this, you know, ever shifting landscape, do you continue to even use and reinvest in Facebook? I do think that there's a spot for it. I do think that there are some pertinent things that are worth you understanding and noticing. Um, and I'm gonna talk about those and especially in the very final episode of this six step kind of framework, we're gonna, um, put all of these platforms back together, right? And we're gonna gonna say here with all these different platforms, all these different like things we talked about, what is a full fledged church social media framework and strategy, taking all these pieces and putting 'em together.

Nick Clason (06:09):
So you're gonna see where Facebook fits into that. Um, but the answer to this is why we think we should continue to, um, participate in Facebook. The answer is twofold. So part number one, like we said in the last episode about TikTok, if you only have time to invest in one, invest in TikTok, I say that primarily for younger ministries, youth pastors, but quite honestly, uh, I think I would still say that the purpose for that is, uh, true, uh, for even like a church, not just a youth ministry like church, trying to reach people for their, you know, their community, their town, whatever. Like nothing wrong with just investing in TikTok. Uh, and a lot of the things today that we're gonna talk about are gonna feel like a lot of groundwork. And so that might be boring and you might not yield as many returns on it.

Nick Clason (06:52):
And so you're probably gonna have to spend a day or a week slow out some of these things, figuring out some of the things. Um, however, if you do wanna build out a fully robust holistic social media strategy, like I said, we're gonna put that together in the final episode of this little mini-series that we're doing. Facebook needs to be a part of it, not necessarily for the reasons that you might think. However, I will caveat this and say in the ranking of importance for Gen Z and Gen Alpha, Facebook is very last on my list for the specific platforms to invest in, right? Like I've, I've said, okay, however, your usage on Facebook on meta is gonna be for three primary reasons. And starting with Facebook's GI gives you an easier road, uh, to launch some other social media or, and this part's important or marketing endeavors that you may be interested in or your church or your pastor or your executive pastor might be interested in you carrying out, overseeing and executing.

Nick Clason (07:48):
All right? And so we're gonna look at this as more of a, um, foundation building as opposed to like a v going viral and, and drumming up a lot of interest and reaching a lot of people. Okay? So be that as it may, Facebook still plays a pretty crucial and important role. Before we go too much further, I do wanna share one last stat with you. 32% of users on Facebook are teenagers. That isn't a lot, but that also isn't nothing. And those teenagers are still users of Facebook. They may not be contributors, but they are as some social media people have dubbed lurkers, which means they are viewing what's going on on Facebook, and they will grow up and they will become, um, the age of the, uh, adults in your church. And in addition to that, a lot of families have parents who spend a lot of their time on Facebook.

Nick Clason (08:38):
And so if you're a demographic, if you're a church reaching families, you may not be reaching their teenagers, but you may be catering to and reaching their parents and there's um, uh, there is a benefit to doing that. All right, so let's dive into Facebook before the history of it and what it is now. Okay, Facebook before and now let's go back to the beginning. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth. Okay, maybe not that far back. Let's go a little further. Okay, let's go to 2004. In 2004, you probably heard of a guy by the name of Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg launched and started Facebook as a social media platform. He launched it in 2004 on Harvard University's campus. He was a sophomore, and his primary purpose there was to connect Harvard students to other Harvard students. And so back in the very original OG Facebook days, it was built primarily for college campuses so that you could see the faces of other college students, know their names, get to know them, but by the end of the year, the almost unimaginable had happened for Zuckerberg and over 1 million users, 1 million users were on Facebook, and the reach had then expanded beyond just his simple campus.

Nick Clason (09:55):
And the spread was like wildfire. And Facebook changed the game forever. Facebook is often thought to be one of the major contributors of ushering in the, uh, the, the, what am I looking for? The setting or the, the, the, gosh, why is this word so hard for me? I don't know what I'm trying to say, but ushering in the idea of Web 2.0. So Web 1.0 was just basic HTML website's, text on a screen, web 2.0 allowed the users to actually be contributing, formatting, crafting what was being said. We are now, by the way, in a world of Web 3.0 where users can create their own reality. Right now it's primarily through things like vr, but the algorithms which are less social graph and now more discovery based are helping you sort of find and create your own reality, which by the way, I think is a little bit dangerous, especially if you are a pastor and you are anchored in the truth of God's word.

Nick Clason (10:53):
However, as opposed to bucking that and saying that you need to just ca cast your phone into like a fire, um, and not look at TikTok, I think you need to help people steward that, that they've been given because now honestly, the reality is social media is not very social like it was back in the day. Uh, we've seen that Gen Z has watched millennials and Gen Xers use and, and lean into their community being all digital, and it has honestly yielded not very good results. So I honestly see a good pendulum shift in some of our Gen Z students and people that I interact with because they lean into more real authentic community. So why are they spending so much time on platforms like TikTok and YouTube? They're, they're, they're honestly there for entertainment more than they are for like social connection. And that's the thing, Facebook was built as a platform of social connection.

Nick Clason (11:43):
And so now it is a legacy platform and it's been around forever and it is still a major player and a major contributor in the game. However, they are having to, having to adjust to TikTok and YouTube have been ushering in, in these last several years that they've seen the younger generations adapt. And because Facebook knows that great Aunt Betty is going to eventually no longer be a user at some point because she's not going to be living on this planet of earth, they need to start catering to the younger generations if they want anyone to even adopt their platform. The reality is a lot of people are not huge fans of Facebook altogether, but whether they know it or not, they're using platforms under the Facebook umbrella. So all that being said, Facebook still remains the number one social media platform to this day based on, uh, based on number of users according to an article, which we will link in the show notes of backlinko backlink.io, I always get that one messed up.

Nick Clason (12:38):
Backlink io Facebook presently has 1.9 billion daily users, which is 6.89% increased year over year. In addition to the massive usage that is found and seen by Facebook users and contributors. Uh, Facebook has been acquiring more and more products, uh, over their lifetime and life cycle. Here are some of the products that they've acquired. You may be have heard of them, Instagram, WhatsApp, gfi, Oculus, and many more. In fact, if my counting and calculations are correct, Facebook has a total acquisition of over 88 different products, um, or companies or tech like focused things, okay? And the total cost of those acquisitions is estimated to be north of 23 billion with a B dollars. So I will link that, that article as well because honestly, uh, I didn't read all of them to you because you get really bored. There's really only like four or five that you probably actually recognize by name, WhatsApp, Instagram, Oculus gif, you the rest are like, what?

Nick Clason (13:46):
And they just absorbed these companies into them and, and stole their intellectual property, not stole, bought their intellectual property to use for their, their behalf and their betterment. Okay? And so as I was first, uh, sitting down to record this podcast and thinking about all this Facebook stuff, um, the reality is this, fast forward to October, 2021, Facebook announces this is the big shift here from Facebook back then to Facebook. Now, Facebook announces a change in their name from Facebook as the parent company to the name Meta. You probably know that if not, you've probably seen it and been unaware that that is, that is where that comes from. All right? And so the name reflects as the company says, um, the name reflects the company's growing ambitions to be relevant beyond just social media. They want to build technology that will help connect people. That's what they say their ultimate goal is.

Nick Clason (14:38):
Uh, I'll link that article in the show notes, but with the announcement of the name change from Facebook into Meta, this giant conglomerate of products that Meta has acquired over the years, it leads us specifically now to how you in your church can and probably should be using Facebook in your context here in 2023 as a part of the six step Church social medium framework. So without any further ado, let's hop in to reason number one, why you should be using Facebook. Reason number one, and the way in which you should be using Facebook in your church and in your ministry is to create a Facebook page. Now, Facebook page is the corporate side of Facebook. It is where businesses and corporations go to have their hours. It's where they link their website. It's, it's where they, at some point in time, we'll run ads and your church more than likely has a corporate company Facebook page.

Nick Clason (15:37):
I would recommend that you start with a Facebook page, not necessarily, because I think it's a great strategy for reaching people organically anymore in 2023. However, it is going to help sort of be the anchor for everything that you do on Facebook. And if you start there, especially if you don't have anything already launched right now, but if you start there, then sort of from there, the rest of everything else can kind of spread, which is one of the reasons why I have jumped Facebook over Instagram, for example, because Facebook is the owner of Instagram. And so if you start with that Facebook page, then you can sort of build things out from there. One of the things that you need to know about Facebook is it's not just a simple username and password sort of login. So if you're inheriting a Facebook page, what you need to do is you need to discover who the admin is on the Facebook page.

Nick Clason (16:24):
The person who has a personal specific profile, their first name and last name, they are an admin to an account. And that is who runs or who is kind of doing the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain, um, managing of Facebook pages. That's how Facebook works. So for example, I just moved to a church about six months ago. They had a a Facebook page, and everyone that I asked, I kept asking to try and get login information for it. They're like, oh yeah, the username password should be on this password document sheet that we have. And, and I just was like, no, that's, that's not how it works. Like, it's not just like I log into Facebook, I have to log in as myself, Nick Clason on my Facebook page, and then I have to be made an administrator or an admin or an editor or a moderator or whatever the case might be, whatever the role is that is decided that has to happen to me, my account, not a login into a specific place.

Nick Clason (17:20):
Okay? So when you start on this place, everything else can sort of be driven from that. The other reason that you would wanna start with a Facebook page is that some point you may want to run ads on your Facebook page. Um, and you may, you can do that either on Facebook, you also can do that through Facebook to your Instagram count if you find Instagram more beneficial to your audience. But you do that through the business suite, the meta suite. And so, um, learning to run an ad is probably one of the most maddening processes, especially if you have no idea what you're doing, what some of the language means or whatever if you're a complete nbe. And so one time I interviewed my friend, former co-host of this podcast, Matt Johnson. He is a marketing freaking guru, uh, and he has done some incredible things, marketing, especially in the ministry space, if you are or have ever heard of or are familiar with the company, dare to share.

Nick Clason (18:16):
He was behind a lot of what they did and a lot of what got them out, uh, visible to a lot of people out in the world. And so, um, he walks us through in a former episode, not link that in the show notes of how to step, how to set up an ad, step by step, uh, running a Facebook ad. So that's there for you. Hopefully that's helpful to you. All right? Step number two is beyond the Facebook page. You should also link your Facebook and Instagram accounts. This is probably one of the most obvious or low hanging fruit reasons why you should start with Facebook, because once you link them, then it's really no extra work, especially if you start on the Instagram side, which we'll get to that in the next episode. But if you start on the Instagram side posting something, all you do is simply toggle on a switch that says also post to Facebook, and boom, you're posting the same content in two places.

Nick Clason (19:08):
That used to be a no-no. That used to be something that you shied away from. But now it's actually something that I and many other church social media marketing managers encourage, especially with the current thing that every social media is focusing on short form video content. It doesn't matter if it's also posted on Instagram, on Facebook, I did a thing the other day, we do this stupid game on our, uh, Instagram, on our TikTok, on our YouTube shorts called, um, , it's called ABC Cheese. So we have a little craft singles and we try to bite like just two of us and try to bite out a letter. And the other person was trying to guess what it's, and so I just was like curious and I was like, how many views did this video in total get? And so I, I looked on YouTube, I looked on TikTok, I looked on Instagram reels, and I looked on Facebook reels, and in total we had somewhere between seven and 800 views on just that one stupid video alone by posting it to all those different platforms.

Nick Clason (20:05):
You know, like one had 600, one had a hundred, one had 300, one had 200, you know what I mean? That kind of all adds up. And you start to think about it, you're like, dang, that's like seven, eight, 9,000 hun. You know, thou not a thousand hundred, 900, a thousand people reach. Like it's a lot, man. Like that's, that's, that's something that churches, youth ministries would've been begging for in years past and before with Facebook pages, primarily as the marketing tool and engine, you had to pay to do it. And you, I mean, you still do if you wanna market stuff, but you can kind of like punch your lottery ticket with any of these reels or short form video and just blow up, or not even blow up, but just get a hundred views across four platforms that adds up to north of 500, north of 700, north of 900 views on any single video.

Nick Clason (20:56):
I think most people would say that that's worth it. All right? The third and final way and, and um, path that I think you should take on Facebook is create a Facebook group. According to a 2021 study, there were approximately 233 million Facebook users in the US alone. 18.2 of those users belong to the 18 to 24 age group, while 18% of those users are 35 to 34 years old. So in total, you're looking at, almost 40% of your users are between the age of 18 and 44. So while your teenagers, your youth ministry might not be spending a lot of time on Facebook, other platforms, um, other people, older demographics definitely are. And I think that you, one of your largest wins as a church is to create a group because that is where you can make community on social media feel intimate and in, in fact, it's probably one of the only platforms that offers a close sort of intimate community style feel.

Nick Clason (21:56):
And so I do think of all of the features that Facebook does have to offer. You can have a group. And so again, if you start with a page, then out of that you can create a group that's connected to that page and you can post as the page admin or you can switch your profile and you can be interacting as yourself in the group, and you can make that that switch. And they've started to make that a lot easier. If you go onto the page on your phone or on your browser, it'll give you a little notification in one of the corners somewhere that says you're interacting as the, the brand, you're interacting as the page or you're interacting as yourself. And then it just gives you a button there. Do you wanna switch? And you click switch and it switches over between yours or your page.

Nick Clason (22:37):
And so you can make some of those things. You also have the opportunity to go to the business suite and schedule some stuff. You can also link and schedule that over to your Instagram. And they now offer scheduling for reels. They offer scheduling for stories, which were not things that they offered previously. All the schedule tools really only posted like static images to pages, um, and your Instagram grid feed. But now they're starting to offer more. Uh, they do, in my personal experience, I've really only been experimenting with schedulers for a little bit here now, but they do seem to choke down your organic reach all of those platforms like it, when you post live time, there really is no way around that. No matter how much you try, no matter how, how much these like schedulers promised you, you're gonna just have better performance on all of your stuff if you are posting it.

Nick Clason (23:26):
Um, and that, but that's a value proposition that you have to weigh through, especially if you have a million other responsibilities. Is it worth it to peace of mind, have it scheduled and you don't have to worry about it? Or is it something that you should, you know, wade into and navigate choice is yours? It's kind up to you. Um, so one of the best things that can do though as a church is to run a Facebook group. And over time you don't even have to be supplying that with a lot of content. The content hopefully will be generated by the users that are already a part of your Facebook group community. Well, everyone, once again, thank you so much for hanging out for this entire episode. I hope that you found this episode helpful. Like I said, the Facebook, uh, episode's a lot more focused on nitty gritty groundwork, building up some stuff so that you can build up a more robust and full social media strategy.

Nick Clason (24:18):
We are going to be diving into that in the future episodes. But coming up next, we are finally moving on to Instagram. We're gonna talk about some strategies and some reasons behind how you can be using Instagram effectively as a church in your 2023 social media framework. In addition to that, before we, we get to the very final piece where we put it all together, we are gonna talk email and texting and website. And so those three things are also critically important, I think to sort of serve as a backdrop and or as a lead generator for some of these other social media platforms to your already existing church audience that you have access to through a database and Excel spreadsheet or whatever the case might be in your particular context. Again, excited to be with you and excited to be right here now on the downhill slide of our six part church miniseries on church social media in 2023.

Nick Clason (25:13):
If you found this episode helpful, do me a favor and please send it to a friend, share it, rate it, review it, all those things are incredibly helpful to me, and they're a free for you to just give back in a very small way to our podcast and the work that we've been doing here at Hybrid Ministry. You can also check out free transcripts that we provide for you for every single episode, and that's over http://www.hybridministry.xyz. Hit the show notes for all the articles that we mentioned for all the other, uh, episodes that we reference for all the other social media places that you can follow me. And until next time, and as always, stay hybrid.

Entire Episode with Complete Transcript:
http://www.hybridministry.xyz/036
Watch this Podcast Episode:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9pjecCnd8FVFCenWharf2g
Follow Nick on TikTok:
https://www.tiktok.com/@clasonnick

SHOWNOTES
Is Digital a Valid Method of Preaching?
https://www.hybridministry.xyz/029

9 TikTok and Reels Videos to use at your church this week!
https://www.hybridministry.xyz/023

The Ultimate 2023 Social Media Calendar, Strategy and Posting Guidelines
https://www.hybridministry.xyz/025

TIMECODES
00:00-02:12 - Intro
02:12-08:40 The Current State of TikTok
08:40-13:35 What does all of this mean?
13:35-18:52 What content should my church post?
18:52-23:40 The Nitty Gritty of Posting to TikTok with Hooks, Captions and where to place your text on screen
23:40-24:59 Conclusion and Outro

TRANSCRIPT
Nick Clason (00:02):
All right. 3, 2, 1. Well, hello there, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Hybrid Ministry Show. I, as always, am your host, Nick Clason. So thrilled to be here with you, uh, on this episode. And we are going to be continuing on in our journey of the sixth Step Church social media framework. But today, in this episode, I am gonna talk about a social media that if you don't have time to go in on any of the other things that we talk about, this is the one that I highly, highly recommend as a youth pastor myself. Um, I recommend this primarily for student ministries. Um, however, I wanna be very clear that, um, this is a, the number one, uh, social media for Generation Z. And you might think, oh, I'm exempt from that. I don't have to worry about Generation Z. And that's just simply not true.

Nick Clason (00:58):
You do. Um, and it will become more and more of a prevalent, uh, problem, so to speak. Not that Generation Z is a problem, but, uh, more and more of a prevalent, um, uh, demographic in your church congregation. More and more, they're graduating every single year, and then they're soon becoming a part of the church or not a part of a church. If we're not willing to speak their native language, and if we're not willing to, uh, reach them where they are soon as youth pastors, we are no longer going to have Generation Z even as a part of our ministry because Generation Alpha is right now sitting in our sixth grade, our fifth grade, our fourth grade, they are the soon to be new generation. And so Gen Z, this digital strategy matters for them. And yes, you guessed it. We are talking about TikTok.

Nick Clason (01:44):
So all that, and more on this episode, as always, show notes, hybridministry.xyz, subscribe on YouTube. Follow me personally on my TikTok, uh, give us a light, give us a subscribe. A subscribe. And please, we would love it if you would give us a rating, especially if you find this information helpful, share it with a friend. But without any further ado, let's dive into why TikTok matters. All right, well, let's talk about the current state of TikTok as it stands in 2023. So, uh, TikTok in just 11 years, so starting back in 2011, all the way now to, um, 2023, so I guess 12 years, uh, TikTok has grown from zero users all the way up to 1 billion estimated users ranking it fourth in social media usage and platforms. So it's only behind Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and then TikTok is fourth. Facebook is at 2.9 billion.

Nick Clason (02:48):
YouTube is at 2.2 billion. Instagram is at 1.4 billion, and TikTok is at 1 billion. Now, keep in mind that I think that, uh, Facebook and Instagram both play a role, but if you're going to go all in on one, I think you should go all in on TikTok. Facebook often is, uh, really popular with the generation of generation X. Instagram is much more popular with my generation, generation of millennials, and TikTok was made famous by our favorite, um, generation, generation Z and TikTok is driving what these other legacy platforms of Facebook, of Instagram, and even YouTube are doing. So all of the players ahead of TikTok in the, um, estimated users, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, all three of those, if you notice, have a TikTok feature, uh, element woven into 'em reels, Instagram reels, Facebook reels, and YouTube shorts, and they're all three trying to compete and catch up with the wild craze that is TikTok.

Nick Clason (03:49):
So what even was TikTok, you might remember that TikTok originally started as a brand called a musical dot l wire or Musical Lee, and it was branded and started much as a lip syncing app. I remember as a youth pastor, there were students that would just lip sync and do the musical Lee, uh, type of deals. And so, uh, it was rebranded as TikTok, and it has come around and it has shot up in a meteoric eyes of popularity to become the almost number one. Um, and not like number one downloads, like I just read through the stats, but like number one in, uh, just desirability, right? Of like entertainment apps and social media switched right from being like this social, legitimately social like connection of like human people. I'm friends with my grandma and I'm friends with my aunt to a, uh, platform of entertainment.

Nick Clason (04:43):
You get on there to watch, to be entertained, to be informed, to be inspired, to be encouraged, to learn something, to laugh, all right? That's what TikTok has kind of become. And so, TikTok, um, was historically thought to be adopted and used by teenagers primarily. And that's why, again, when we think of Generation Z, we think, oh, those are teenagers, right? But I wanna read for you something. Um, some of the most recent data says this, 10 year olds to 19 year olds make up 32.5% of the users on TikTok, where 20 to 29 year olds make up 29.5% of the users on TikTok. 30 to 39 year olds make up 16.4, 40 to 49 year olds make up 13.9 and 50 plus make up 7.1. So if you do some quick dirty math, you're looking at greater than 60% of your users are anywhere from the age of 10 to 30.

Nick Clason (05:36):
And if you do a little bit more math, 75% of the users on the TikTok app are under the age of 40. Now, let me ask you, is this something that youth pastors only need to be worried about? And I would contend that the answer is no. Yes, the greatest use is of the younger generations, but 10 to 19, that 19 year old's gonna be 20 pretty soon. And my guess is you wanna reach a 20 year old. Like, my guess is you wanna reach a 25, a 27, a 32 year old, and so start going where they are. So according to an article from, uh, September, 2022 in the New York Times, uh, this is what it has said. It said, TikTok is now becoming the new search engine for Generation Z. Here's what the quote says. This is a powerful tool for teenagers, for students, and for the people in your congregation.

Nick Clason (06:30):
So according to this Afor engine, New York Times article, more and more young people are using talk's powerful algorithm, which personalizes the videos that are shown to you and your for you page, which is based on your interactions with the content. And so to find, uh, information that UNC candidly caters to their tastes, the tailoring, that tailoring is then coupled with a sense that there are real people on the app and are synthesizing and delivering information rather than just simply faceless websites. So there, right there is where you find the social component, but greater than 80 to 90% of the content that most people interact with on TikTok comes from people that they have never met. So pair in mind that the, the usage is meteoric and it is rising faster and faster. And also that now Generation Z is going to TikTok as one of their pry Mary places for search.

Nick Clason (07:31):
And what did we talk about was the reason in the last episode that YouTube was such a crucial, uh, ground for you to be diving into as a church, as a church creator, is you could create very custom howto content. So that's also now the case with TikTok. One last thing that is, uh, important for you to know about TikTok, while the, while TikTok does, uh, have is only fourth, right? In the overall ranking of, um, social media apps, there was a term, um, coined as power users and 29% of TikTok users are considered power users, and they're the ones who will use the app every single day and further study on that TikTok users spend wait for it on average 95 minutes per day. That's over, that's an hour and a half of their day spent on the app, which does rank number one amongst all of the social media apps for most time used on the TikTok app.

Nick Clason (08:34):
So that is where we are. What does all of this mean? All right, so what does all of this mean? Like we said, TikTok is beginning to trend older, and even the users themselves are just simply getting older. And it is right now the leader, right? The leader for Generation Z, um, and I think probably soon to be millennials, and those, uh, people are soon to be square in the main demographic of people that your church is likely going to be focused on reaching. The other reason, like I said earlier, consider the fact that Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube have all recently adopted a TikTok algorithm, reels, shorts, right, to make as a cornerstone of their social media, um, strategy moving forward. And so they're, they are responding to this social media app over here, which is why I don't think it's it's necessarily worth, uh, your, I don't know that you need to be ignoring it or that you should be ignoring it, right?

Nick Clason (09:34):
These other social media platforms, I feel like, oh, we're gonna be all in over here on YouTube, on Instagram to perform well on YouTube and Instagram right now. You need to go all in on the TikTok feature that they have implemented. It's not called TikTok, it's called reels, it's called shorts. But you need to still be all in over on that. And so the legacy platform that made that famous, you should start there. Those are reasons why I think TikTok is currently the most important of all the things you might be wondering. Well then why we talk about YouTube last week, and we're gonna talk about this in the very final episode, but just as a sneak peek of this little, uh, series that we're doing, um, you always want to be able to take your short form content and point it back to something more longer form, and that's where that can live over there on YouTube.

Nick Clason (10:16):
That's the short answer to that. Okay? So I also want to consider some of the theological implications for this, okay? Acts chapter one, verse eight, very famously, the Great Commission, Jesus says, but you will receive the power of the Holy Spirit. He'll come upon you, and then you'll be my witnesses telling people about me in Jerusalem, in Judea and Samaria, and then ultimately to the utter most parts of the Earth. You might be thinking, well, yeah. So why does me posting a dancing video of my senior pastor on TikTok accomplish the mission of reaching people? Talk's? Algorithm is largely a mystery. People have been trying to crack that code. Obviously, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube are all studying it to try and create their own versions of it. However, there is one thing that we do know is that what, the way that TikTok spreads the message is very much in the same concentric circles that we see described by Jesus in Acts chapter one.

Nick Clason (11:08):
Verse eight starts by sharing it to your followers. And if they respond well to it, it'll share it to more of their followers. And it starts even geographical. It starts around where you are. You can geotag yourself in your TikTok when you post them. And so it, it does accomplish the mission of helping spread that message until you, more and more people, hundreds, thousands of people can get to hear the message of Jesus every day. Consider this. Let me just give you an anecdotal example. I have a, uh, I'm a youth pastor in an ministry where on average, on a given set, like Wednesday night, we probably average anywhere between a hundred and 150 students, okay? If I post a TikTok about, uh, just a clip from a message or a, a message on there that has something to do with God or theology, or I'm helping share and spread the good news, I'm helping teach people, encourage people, equip people an average video, that that does not perform very well to my standards on TikTok, we'll get somewhere between two and 300 views.

Nick Clason (12:14):
That is literally double the number of people that see that content then come to my, uh, regular in-person gathering. So why does this matter? I think it matters because we have an opportunity to reach far beyond just the people that have their butts in their seats in the ministry that I lead. And the same is true for you. You have the ability to help get the message out there. Now, you might be thinking, well, why don't, our church doesn't wanna do that? Every church has been tasked by Jesus Christ himself. Acts chapter one verse eight, Matthew 28 18 through 18 through 20, to help fulfill the great commission. And there's an element of discipleship in there where, yes, you have to teach them to obey everything that he has commanded us to do, but also there is a reach component. Get the message of Jesus out there.

Nick Clason (13:04):
Can that be done via digital means? I would contend that yes, it, it can, and we talked about that early on. Um, we talked about that, uh, actually a couple episodes ago in, uh, the can, can the, can the message of Jesus be done and shared digitally? And, uh, you can go back and listen to it. I'll link to it here in the show notes. But yes, I would contend that yes, it can be done that way. Uh, and you'll see why, and you'll be, you'll have an explanation of why that matters. All right? So this is the age old question, right? What do I post? You might be wondering that you might be asking that. Well, uh, I'll link to an episode that I did at the end of 2022 on this podcast, but it, it's titled, I think, nine TikTok and Short Form Video Ideas that you Can Post on your Church social Media this week.

Nick Clason (13:58):
I also, uh, laid out for you my complete weekly strategy in another episode. Um, I think it's episode 25, the Ultimate 2023, uh, social media calendar strategy and posting schedule. I'll post both of those if those are something that you find interesting, but they're just chock full of ideas, and honestly, they're very like boots on the ground for me, uh, and stuff that I post every single week. But real quick, uh, a high overview on some of those is, uh, there are really, they're like 3, 4, 5 different categories of things that you can post. The first one is trends. If you spend any time on TikTok, on TikTok app, just yourself personally, I use that save feature incredibly liberally. It's the little like bookmark looking thing on your app. And then I can go back to my personal profile and see things that I've saved. And, but you gotta jump on those trends fast.

Nick Clason (14:51):
So I always, on my, my posting calendar, um, I don't schedule myself out so much. I leave just some space to do some trends. And so two or three times a week I say post a trend and I go into my saved things, and I'm like, what is going on right now on TikTok? And if there's a certain song or a certain cap cut template or something like that, I just use it and I try to find a, think of a creative, fun, relatable way to use it, and I just use it. Another thing is, um, you can just, you can film like custom content, you know yourself. So like, uh, let me give you an example of, of just that thing I'm trying, um, and you can go check it out on our church, uh, TikTok right now. I I don't wanna, um, give you the link verbally here, so go to the show notes because I'm working on changing the name to it.

Nick Clason (15:39):
I don't know if, if by the time this post, uh, if the name will be changed or not. But anyway, um, I, I made this game. Um, I'm an author on download youth ministry.com. Um, so I made this game called gif flashback, where you watch a gif for like, uh, seven seconds, and then, um, immediately you're asked a question to just recall what you saw. And so I tried something where me and another, uh, member of my team are named Bailey. We went around all different places in the church, and that's intentional. Uh, as far as TikTok is concerned, we'd, we'd swap out like, uh, outfits and we'd go to different places in the church. And so we shot them all at the same time, but they're in all different pockets and corners at the church. Some are outside, some are inside, some are, you know, whatever.

Nick Clason (16:20):
At my desk, her desk in the, in the Gaga pit, whatever. And, uh, one of us would run in and be like, quick, Bailey, give flashback, and we'd watch the, the game, all right? And while we're watching it on one of our phones, I would then edit where I'd put the game in on top of the phone. And so I, or she would be playing it by answering the questions and giving the, the answers, but the user, while they're watching it can also, um, watch it and interact with it and play the game as well, right? And so that's a way to use a game that's made for social, um, but also like post it on your TikTok and just have some fun, right? Um, you can do like emoji bible guessing games, which by the way, go to my D ym, uh, link. Uh, I'll drop that in the show notes here as well.

Nick Clason (17:04):
And you can buy, I have all kinds of like, uh, a game called Emoji phraseology, and every single one of them has a vertically formatted video or, uh, wide screen, or, I'm sorry, uh, video or static, uh, slide that you can post as well as you, uh, interact with or as you, um, edit your video so you can play like emoji guessing games, get flashback, all those things. Um, but yeah, po uh, post some of those just different like fun game type things to do. I also like to do like a lot of minute to win it style games, right? And I just film those, and then I clip 'em up, I edit 'em, um, have fun with them. Other things I like to do post educational videos, like, not, not like, here's some math, right? But like theologically educational videos. So the entire month of January, I posted a, I talked a lot about habits.

Nick Clason (17:51):
We were in a series of habits, and so I talked about the psychology of building a good habit. And then the entire month of February, I answered some deep theological like questions or just some core tenets, like of the faith. And I walked through, you know, salvation and the Holy Spirit and sin and the problem of evil. And I just like, I, I posted those, you know, occasionally. Um, also, you can always post message clips. And this is why, if you go back to the last podcast that I posted, um, about YouTube as the first step of the strategy, if you're pre-filing or if you're live streaming, you can find two to three short message clips, and you can edit them with a good hook in where you resolve a good hook and you have some good music behind it. And you can post, uh, some of those message, uh, clips on your, on your TikTok, and then you can point those back to the longer form video or audio content for people to find and consume.

Nick Clason (18:45):
So speaking of hooks, speaking of archetypes, speaking of how to build it, let's dive into that. Next, let's do it. Let's get nitty gritty here. Posting best practices. Number one, you want to have a good hook. You can use the text on screen option, or you can use the text to speech option as the narrated, uh, the narrated, uh, AI sounding voice. But essentially, you need to tell your audience within the first three seconds what this video is going to be about. Because, you know, swiping habits, people are not hovering on videos for very long. If it's not interesting, boom, they're onto the next thing. Boom, they're onto the next thing. This often requires a mindset shift for pastors who hold their hook or who hold their, like, ace up their sleeve usually until the very end of a sermon. Get it out at the very beginning.

Nick Clason (19:35):
What are you talking about in this video? The other thing is use onscreen captions. They're not for just people who are hard of hearing at this point. Captions are useful because a lot of times people can't watch videos in public places with headphones in. So if your video has captions, they can still watch it, even if their phone is v is, uh, volume is turned all the way down. In fact, check this up. 69% of people say that they view video with their sound off in public places. 69% is almost 70% of users and 25% watch with sound off when they're even in private places. So if you have captions on your videos, people can still watch wherever they are. TikTok will has an auto trans transcribed feature. It works really well. Just pop that onto every single video that you use. All right? You need to make sure you have a call to action.

Nick Clason (20:23):
So as you're building your audience on TikTok, make sure that you give them a call to action. Tell them to follow for more, save or view this video for later, or head to the Lincoln bio to watch the full message. Again, this is why if you are using our six step framework and you have your YouTube channel linked in your bio, you can send people who are watching message clips to go on and watch the full message to link in bio. And just remember that more than just going viral and building an audience, um, is not just for vanity metrics, right? Is that if you have something significant and meaningful to say, people will want to dial in and listen to longer versions of what you have as they're in their discovery algorithms, finding things on their phone and online. Also, watch where you're placing your text in a TikTok video.

Nick Clason (21:07):
The top, the bottom and the right side are all off limits. So you really need to hit right in the middle and more, uh, left of center. Uh, I hate when I see people who post things and they, they post it behind the natural places that TikTok covers things. TikTok screen is incredibly busy. So, uh, just look and know where you can and cannot post your text on screen and make sure it doesn't get covered up. Uh, captions and hashtags, I recommend no more than a one sentence caption and no more than three to five hashtags. And if your caption, um, has a word in it, you do not need to hashtag that same word later, right? Like we said, gen Z is using, uh, TikTok, and TikTok is also building on the back end of more searchability. So, um, if, if one of your words is already in your caption, you do not need the hashtag to find it, it will, it will search all of the text on your screen, which again, use text on screen, use their text editor.

Nick Clason (22:09):
Um, I actually use TikTok. Um, if I'm, if I'm editing on my phone, I'd probably do 50% edit on my computer, 50% edit on my phone directly. Um, if I'm editing on my phone, I edit in the TikTok app, then I download that without the watermark and I post out to all my other content. But TikTok is the, the starting spot for me. And so, um, all the texts on screen, all the things I use natively, they will search my video and find those things and, and help index that in their search back out to other people. Um, and then finally, audio. If you are a business account, your audio options on TikTok are going to be far more limited, which is why if you can do an edit in a computer, it's gonna be better for you. Um, if you're not a business account, and I talk about this in my ebook, which will link to that in the show notes as well.

Nick Clason (22:57):
Um, there are pros and cons to whether or not you want to be a business account or not. I still, to this day, have not converted ourselves to a business account, but that, that day is probably coming to an end here soon. The biggest disadvantage is I can't just lazily use trending audio. Um, that almost always is, you know, you know, not royalty free and I, you have to pay royalties on it or whatever. There are workarounds to it where you just, you edit the video with that audio in a, like, Adobe Premiere Pro or something like that, and then it's like an original sound for you. It's, but it's not being indexed in search based on that audio. Um, less and less. I think that the quality of the content is gonna be more important than the actual, like, hacking of the system by finding the certain audio things.

Nick Clason (23:42):
All right. Well, thank you so much for hanging out this entire episode. Like I just said, if, uh, you have not yet grabbed our free e-book, this episode in particular on how to post a TikTok from scratch, the question that the, the title of the e-book is, have I already Ruined My Church TikTok account? And will help you answer that. So go grab your free e-book. Also a rating or review will be incredibly helpful to subscribe over, over on YouTube if you wanna watch this video. We got blower thirds, we got custom graphics flying in. Some of the things I talked about, uh, are gonna be visible on screen that you just have to listen to in your earbuds. And if you heard anything that you're like, that was interesting, I need to go, uh, unpack that a little bit more. We have three transcripts for you over at hybridministry.xyz head there, check it out. But we're so glad that you're on this journey with us. I hope that you are finding this six step social media framework helpful. This was just step number two. Next episode we're step three, which is Facebook. So excited for that. Join us. We'd love to have you there. And until next time, and as always, stay hybrid.

All you need and more at: http://www.hybridministry.xyz
Follow along on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@clasonnick
Keep up with what's happening on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/user/@clasonnick

SHOWNOTES

MY STUDENT MINISTRY YOUTUBE CHANNEL: https://www.youtube.com/@crosscreekstudents
CHURCH YOUTUBE STARTER KIT: https://www.hybridministry.xyz/033
TRENDS SITE: http://www.trends.google.com

TIMECODES
00:00-02:30 Intro
02:30-08:05 Why you should begin with YouTube when building out your Social Strategy
08:05-11:35 Optimal YouTube video lengths and watch time analytics
11:35-14:33 Make your intros compelling
14:33-17:42 The importance of titling and metadescriptions
17:42-18:07 Thumbnails on YouTube
18:07-18:44 How to find keywords based on trending topics
18:44-19:10 Comments and shares on YouTube
19:10-20:38 YouTube Conclusion
20:38-22:15 Outro

TRANSCRIPT
Nick Clason (00:01):
Well, hello there and welcome everybody to the Hybrid Minister Show. As always, I am your host, Nick Clason. So excited to be with you. And if you did not hear the trailer that we dropped earlier this week, we are going to be diving into a full fledged social media strategy. And this is part one of the six part series of putting an entire social media framework and strategy, um, in place for the, for your church, for your ministry, um, and for the people that you are attempting to reach. This is aimed at churches and pastors of what can probably be used and adapted for other places in marketplace and whatnot. And so on. Today's very first episode, we are going to be launching and starting with the platform of YouTube. Yes, we most recently dropped a, uh, episode called Don't Sleep on YouTube, A link to that in the show notes.

Nick Clason (00:57):
But we are going to be specifically looking at the strategy, um, the social media strategy. And we are starting with YouTube. And you'll see why here in just a minute. But before we dive in, do not forget a rating or review would be amazing. You can head over to our YouTube channel and see this live with some lower thirds and some graphics woven in to maybe help, uh, support some of the arguments that we're making. So if you find that, uh, helpful or interesting, make sure that you head there. Also, as always, you can head to hybrid ministry.xyz, both for our ebook. Have I already ruined my Church TikTok account, which is a complete guide to post any TikTok from start to finish. If you have no idea what you're doing, here're just getting started, this ebook is for you. And if you are a TikTok veteran, probably still for you cuz honestly, I learned some things as I made it.

Nick Clason (01:49):
Um, and then the other thing is that as always, we provide free a hundred percent free transcript, um, show notes to every single episode. So you can head to hybrid ministry.xyz.xyz. Yes, it is a suffix to a website despite what people might think. Just I like, I actually think it's a creative one, an interesting one. It's very, very like unknown. Um, so if like a.com is taken, I often opt for a.xyz cause I just think it's, it's cool. So anyway, uh, head to those places and, uh, without any further ado, let's dive in. Little break. Let me get some coffee. Let's dive into why we should start with YouTube. Here we go. All right, so why should we start with YouTube? I believe if done optimally, your church social media strategy to borrow from marketing, if you will, um, I'm gonna attempt to create this with my hands.

Nick Clason (02:46):
So if you're watching on YouTube stream, it's gonna make sense to you, but it's like a funnel, right? And so, especially now in the days of the algorithms where it's discovery, discovery focused as opposed to just following your friends like it used to be, um, you are going to want to, uh, catch people at the top of your funnel. And the top of the funnel is very wide now because of YouTube shorts, because of Instagram reels, Facebook reels, and because of TikTok, you can reach and catch people that you would've never otherwise interacted with. Maybe they're people that are local to you geographically, maybe not. But the reality is, is that you're going to be finding people in the top of that funnel that you never would've had that relationship with before. That's amazing. So that's what churches have been looking for and asking for social media for years.

Nick Clason (03:36):
How can we expand our reach? How can we share the gospel of Jesus? How can we find different people that we might want to minister to or share the, the truth or love of Jesus with them? However, what are you going to do with them once you get them? And I think, uh, for me, a lot of the, a lot of the question I was even asking, um, Matt, who was former co-host of this podcast, I was even asking him early on, like, okay, great, that's awesome. So we go viral on TikTok, then what? And, and he didn't even know. So that's how new all of this is. It, it all lives within the life of this podcast, which is under a year old, um, by the time of this posting. And so, so once that funnel, once we start catching people who are finding awareness, we need to drive them to something, what are we driving them to?

Nick Clason (04:24):
I think, and I would propose that the best thing to drive someone to, especially if they're just finding you on social media, is to drive them to listening to longer form, uh, pieces of content. There was, uh, we talked about it in the, the YouTube, uh, trends, the YouTube trends, uh, not trends report. The YouTube Trends podcast I dropped a couple of weeks ago. Um, and I'm trying to look it up right here. Lifetime. So that's why I'm fumbling around. Um, let's see if, uh, I can find it, but I'm probably not gonna be able to find it. But there's a stat that says, um, some percentage that's, that's the sta I'm looking for. I don't know the number, but some percentage of people look up, uh, or use like short form videos in order to find longer form video content or longer form content of some sort.

Nick Clason (05:20):
So, so, uh, especially the generation, um, that's coming. Gen z, gen Alpha, they might spend time on TikTok, they might spend time on YouTube shorts, see a short snippet of something, and then that might prompt them to go watch something longer. Now here's the thing. Um, no offense, sermons are not, not that new and not that interesting. And so therefore, that may not be the most captivating thing that someone's gonna want to be driven towards. But if they find their way to something creative, something different, or just your pastor's interesting, or the topic that your pastor preached on is interesting, then yeah, I think you are gonna get people to drive towards it. So that's why I say start with YouTube. Now, I I, when I wrote this, I had a very different view of YouTube. We hadn't even started when I, when I wrote this, I wrote this, uh, for a, uh, youth ministry company.

Nick Clason (06:15):
And so when I wrote it, I, I had not even started practically using YouTube in my ministry yet. And, um, what's crazy is even if you listen back to last, last week's episode on Don't Sleep On YouTube, I said, we now have over 70 subscribers to our YouTube. Since the time of that posting, which, or recording from then to now, which is only a week gap in time, we have grown our YouTube to up to 106 subscribers. So we've had 36 or so subscribers join us on YouTube, which is just bonkers crazy. So why start with YouTube? Obviously, YouTube, uh, is owned by Google, so it has a search engine component to it. Um, in addition to that, it's got long form video content and now short form video content. So you can use the short form to get discovered and gain subscribers to then support and supplement and push to your long form video content.

Nick Clason (07:15):
I'm gonna recommend that all the other platforms also PO point to YouTube just as a place where your videos and your containers live. And so, um, that is, that is what I think is optimal, opening the top of the funnel, driving them another step deeper. Obviously, the lowest part of the funnel is them making a decision to follow Jesus, maybe becoming a, a full, fully devoted follower of Jesus, um, integrated into the life of your church and attending regularly in person. But going from watching a 62nd clip to a several minute video, that's a big jump. That's a big step. Let's, let's chat through the elements and purposes and, um, reasons why we should start with YouTube and what we know about it today in 2023. Let's go. All right, so let's talk about watch times. We've talked about this a fair bit on this podcast and other, uh, episodes and whatnot.

Nick Clason (08:12):
But according to backlinko.com, they surveyed 1.3 million YouTube videos, um, to try and better understand the YouTube search feature. And they determined this, uh, fact from their survey. Longer videos significantly outperform shorter videos. Now we're talking long form, wide screen, like typical YouTube videos, not YouTube shorts. It's a completely different section and platform, but longer videos significantly outperform shorter videos. The average length of a first page YouTube video that is indexed on the first page is 14 minutes and 50 seconds. So you're looking in that sweet spot of, I would say anywhere from 12 minutes to 18 minutes is a good length that you want to be shooting for, for your YouTube videos. Now, the question that you might have is like, well, what if I live stream my sermon and my pastor preaches for 35 minutes? Well, that's great, and you can continue to use that and you should continue to put that up on YouTube if you have the live streaming capabilities and whatnot.

Nick Clason (09:18):
However, in some context, if you're starting from scratch, one of the things that I have been pushing and recommending, and one of the things that we have been doing over at our church Cross Creek students, which by the way, if you want, I'll drop a link to our YouTube channel on the show notes. You can see what I'm talking about when I recommend pre-filing your content. So you don't need a lot, I mean, we use a cell phone, which is the same cell phone I'm using to shoot this YouTube video here. So you can check that out, um, on our YouTube channel. Um, we use that to shoot, I grab the couple of like external microphones just so that the audio quality is above average and that is it, you know, some basic lighting stuff, but nothing crazy. Uh, and that gives us a, a multiple different, like, things to do.

Nick Clason (10:06):
Like when we preach live, we're probably preaching that 30 plus minute thing or, or at least bumping up right against it, which is not optimal for the YouTube, um, search length. The other thing is that it does give us extra time with our content. If, if we deliver it once to a phone and then once live in the room, like by the time we're live in the room, like we're pretty well versed with what our content is going to be, it's not gonna be a shock to us. We're not gonna get up there and be like, what is this again? Um, especially if you're using curriculum pre can pre-canned curriculum, you can, um, you can fall under the, the habit of not really reviewing it very well and you get up there and you're, you're much more stuck to your notes than you maybe wanna be, or you wrote it a long time ago and you're dusting it off for a new environment.

Nick Clason (10:52):
Maybe that's exactly what I'm doing all the time. Uh, you know, so, so once YouTube kind of came up with that conclusion, um, that's how, that's how YouTube, uh, chooses what videos get promoted. All right? So the way that they do it is a combination of both overall watch time paired with average percent viewed. So, uh, if it's a 10 minute video and they watch seven minutes, that's 70% of the video viewed. So it turns out that the videos in that 14 to 16 minute range really index well, uh, a couple other factors to help make your videos compelling. Let's check it out. All right, so make the intro of your video compelling. Let's play out a couple scenarios. Scenario number one. Hey everyone, welcome back to church. Excited to be here. Hey, real quick before we dive in, tonight's message, I do wanna remind you about the Churchwide Bake Sale.

Nick Clason (11:52):
It's coming up this Sunday. If you are interested in earning money toward the mission strip, don't forget you have to be in attendance. If for some reason you can't make it, please make sure to talk to, uh, dear Aunt Betty in the back, she's waving her hand, she's got her plaid apron on, let her know that you won't be at the bake sale. So, to dive into tonight's message, we're gonna be in John chapter one, or scenario number two. What would you do if you won a million dollars? Like, think about it, right? Like if I told you that the message that Jesus is giving supersedes the benefit of winning a million dollars, would you be interested in hearing what that message is? All that and more in this video, make sure that you stick around to the very end, cuz we're gonna give away the $1 million checklist.

Nick Clason (12:46):
Like see how those are two completely different things when you pre-lim, that's how you can start your video. When you get up live in a room, you, you might get stuck into giving the announcement about Aunt Betty's bake sale. And, and that's not a bad thing. Like that's, that's not, uh, making you a bad communicator or anything. That's part of what it is to be a pastor, to keep people informed and whatever and whatnot. So make the intros of your video compelling. Now what if you are live streaming already and you, you do get the amp Betty Bake sales stuff? I think that you can drop a minute, 32nd to a minute, uh, separate video in front to do that hook stuff. Um, someone who's already maybe previewed or seen the message or someone who knows what's gonna come and you drop that in before you, uh, drop drop in the rest of the, the sermon video.

Nick Clason (13:40):
Um, now you might be asking like, well, what about worship? I do think that there's pro, there's value in li actual like live, live streaming, like on Sunday morning. But once that's over as far as like posting and indexing to YouTube, I would recommend posting the sermons separately in a separate playlist or a separate video. And when you do that, that's when you can drop that intro video in refrain from the habit of what churches are going to be notorious for, which is like pre-filing one, um, and using it every single week to save on time. I, I would recommend making it custom to what is actually being preached, what is actually being taught so that the hook, the intro is actually relevant to what the actual content of the message is. Not just a generic, Hey, welcome, glad you on our YouTube channel, blah, blah, blah.

Nick Clason (14:29):
No one cares about that, that's not interesting. They're swiping away to the next one. What are some other YouTube best practices? Uh, titling, titling really matters. So for the longest time I was working at church where we, um, were in different, like we would call them seasons, uh, to, to do the video thing, which was at least good, but we would just title it like, um, our show was called Unscripted. So we were titling it unscripted season two, episode four, um, you know, rubber ducky Night or whatever it was. And that titling sucked . It didn't help, it wasn't searchable, right? YouTube is built by Google. So YouTube is a search engine type of content. So a title like, is Hella Real Place dealing with crippling anxiety or is rest even possible in 2023? You see, all of those are much more captivating titles. And so just, uh, a lot of times you gotta think about this, a lot of times churches create a sermon series, um, with a name that's like got some mystery sort of woven into it.

Nick Clason (15:38):
Think about the way that pastors communicate, pastors communicate, where they try to hook you in. They try to hook a live studio audience alive, you know, seated, uh, uh, in auditorium type audience in, but they hold their, they hold their main point. They hold the ultimate thing that they're gonna try and the ultimate truth that they're trying to share till the very end. It's like sort of this like grand reveal. That's, that's a strategy for public speaking. However, think about the videos that you watch online. They tell you instantly right at the top what the video is gonna be. They, they leave some mystery still, yes, some intrigue, but they, they don't mess around. They don't start out slow with some story about their dog from the night before, whatever, whatever it is that, that pastors are notorious for doing. And I can say this cuz I'm a pastor, I was trained that way.

Nick Clason (16:33):
I lean that way. Uh, that's my natural inclination to teach that way. So I'm trying to get better at putting things on the front end as well as titling it. And so, but you'll even see churches like Elevation do this. Um, they'll clip Pastor Steven's message cuz he'll preach for a long time. They'll clip it down to that good window. Um, and then they'll retitle it, even if it's different from the sermon series. Because what you gotta understand is your sermon series may be a good title for an in-person congregation audience, but that may not, that may not index well on YouTube, which is a search platform. So retitling is a helpful, helpful thing. The meta-description matters. So just like the title, the meta description is pulling out keywords and words that you have in there. It plays a huge role in your, your rankings.

Nick Clason (17:20):
And if you link to things like your church's website or your social media or maybe even some products or things that you talk about in your video, that also helps. Tags are important. Um, they recommend tags that, that are included in your video that can relate back to the topic of your video. So all three of those factors, tags, titles and meta descriptions help your YouTube search content thumbnails. Uh, if you're on YouTube, I'm gonna put the, this screenshot right here. Look at Mr. Beast's, um, thumbnails. Okay? Um, so he actually spent some time crafting these, creating these. Obviously he has a team, but you can put more effort into your thumbnails that is also gonna help the clickability and the search rate. Uh, those, those things matter. Another thing is trends. And you can use a free tool like trends.google.com, uh, to look up some more searchable type words.

Nick Clason (18:15):
And so, uh, you can take some words and start, uh, playing with them and see how they rank with, with searchability and whatever and whatnot. And that's gonna help you title it. That might also help you, um, as you're titling it, then putting those words on your thumbnail. And so, um, I'll, I'll show a screenshot of what it looks like, um, and, and how that, how that works. But, um, it's just a pretty basic, like, it's just a basic tool where you can compare the searchability of two different types and styles of words. Uh, last thing is, uh, comments and shares. They have a positive corollary effect on your video. So the more that you can, um, encourage and ask for comments and maybe even drum some up is gonna be helpful. So those things help with your videos. Uh, also embedding your videos if you embed your YouTube video onto like, say your church website or something.

Nick Clason (19:04):
Videos that are embedded YouTube indexes and rates really well. So those things also help a lot. So what's our conclusion? Only conclusion. Uh, according to state of Mobile, 2020 two.com, users spend 23.7 hours a month using the YouTube app. So people in your church are spending time on YouTube. They may not be spending time on YouTube for the purposes of your church and maybe spending time on YouTube to change out faucets and sinks in their house. But nonetheless, you putting your message on YouTube puts you in a, uh, position to be discovered and, um, people to come across your content because we have been tasked with the mission of spreading and sharing God's word and his message to the ends of the earth. And so this me, this method helps really bring your, um, church's message into a hybrid space. Now, beyond just your Sunday sermons, don't forget there are other options of content.

Nick Clason (20:05):
There are, um, some, you know, like there are some other ideas, there are some other classes, there are some other types of, uh, uh, content that you can produce and create. But I would start at a bare minimum. If you just can start, I would definitely start getting your, your regular messages, the things that you're already spending time doing, as opposed to creating another thing or another piece of content. But the things you're already doing in the regular flow and rhythm of your week. Get that stuff created, get that stuff, um, out there for the world to see. Well, hey guys, once again, thank you so much for sticking around to the end of this video. I hope you found this helpful. Hey, listen, if you did, it would mean the world to me if you would give us a rating or a review or even better share it with a friend and make sure that if you have not yet go pick up our free ebook.

Nick Clason (20:56):
Have I already ruined my church's TikTok account? A complete guide to posting a TikTok from Scratch. Make sure you grab that. That would be an amazing gift to us. We would love it if you, um, used that and found that helpful in your context, whatever the, your context might be. And finally, make sure you head over to YouTube, subscribe to our YouTube channel There link is gonna be in the show notes because it is under my personal name. It's not under the ministry that is, um, we're just trying some stuff out. We may convert it, we may not. I dunno. We'll see. Uh, I'm not, I'm, I'm not that deep into it yet. Uh, finally, don't forget every single episode we have Transcript Hybrid Ministries, XY Z for that. Excited to be with you on this journey. In our next episode, we are going to be diving in to, uh, I believe gonna be diving into TikTok and talking about that. Uh, and that's where the inspiration from my ebook came from. So excited to have you in for that. Uh, excited to explain to you and talk to you about the ups and downs and the, the wide swirling things of the crazy app and platform known as TikTok. But hey, until next time, my friends will talk to you. Stay hybrid.

No expensive camera gear or elaborate setups required! With just your cell phone and less than $100 worth of accessible equipment, you can create compelling and professional-quality videos that will captivate your audience.

Together, let's harness the power of hybrid ministry to spread your ministry's message far and wide, making a positive impact on the lives of countless individuals.

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START YOUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL WITH YOUR PHONE FOR LESS THAN $100
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Watch this Episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9pjecCnd8FVFCenWharf2g
Full Transcript and Links at: http://www.hybridministry.xyz/033
FREE E-Book: https://www.hybridministry.xyz/articles/ebook

TIMECODES
00:00-01:46 Intro
01:46-08:50 Don't Sleep on YouTube
08:50-12:26 Recommended YouTube Strategy in 2023
12:26-16:45 Editing your YouTube Video
16:45-18:04 2023 Church YouTube Channel Gear Starter Kit
18:04-21:00 Turning your long-form content into social clips
21:00- 22:18 Turning viewers of Shorts into Subscribers and viewers of longer form videos
22:18-24:45 Utilizing YouTube videos for Hybrid Ministry
24:45-26:05 The added benefit of Pre-Filming
26:05-27:53 Outro

TRANSCRIPT
Nick Clason (00:02):
Well, what is up everybody? Welcome back to another episode and YouTube video of the Hybrid Minister Show. Hop in the show notes to subscribe or check out the other platform. If you're not on YouTube or if you're not listening on a podcast. Excited to be with you today. My name is Nick Clason, and I, as always am your host. You know what we are going to be talking about today? Do not sleep on YouTube. We're gonna dive into that in just a minute. But before we do, make sure you hit the show notes hybridministry.xyz, episode 33. So at http://www.hybridministry.xyz/033 for all the show notes, especially in this episode, I'm gonna share some actual product links to some things that we're using. I'm not an affiliate or anything like that, but just, this is what we've done. This is what we've used, so make sure you go check that out as well as if you have not head to the, have I already ruined my church's TikTok account, A complete guide to posting a TikTok from Scratch.

Nick Clason (01:09):
And the reason I made this is because I want this to be a guide for anybody who's never even opened the TikTok app to a first be able to shoot and edit a TikTok, but then be able to cross post it to all the different platforms. Um, so go and check that out. That's a free gift from us to you. Hit the link in the show notes for that. Alright, everyone, glad to have you. Thanks for being here. If you're on YouTube, hit that subscribe and bell button. If you're on podcast, I'd love, we'd love to also ask you to hit that subscribe button. But let's dive into, don't Sleep on YouTube, episode 33. Here we go. Well, hey there everybody, and, uh, in this episode, like I said, I want to talk about Don't sleep on YouTube. Now, what does that mean? I think, um, at least in my sphere or whatever, like I think YouTube is like a little bit the forgotten child of social media.

Nick Clason (02:05):
I was talking on the phone this week to my brother, um, who's just getting started at a church and just getting started on his social media accounts. And he's like, so should we do TikTok? And I was like, yeah, for sure, but he is a youth pastor. Should we do Instagram? Like, yeah, yeah, you can do Instagram. Um, anything else is like YouTube. And he's like, YouTube, really? And I was like, yeah, YouTube, uh, here's why. YouTube is the either second or third, depending on how you look at it. Largest search engine. So, I mean, if, if it's not second, uh, behind Google, the argument is that it is third behind Google, Google Images, and then, uh, YouTube is third. And so, um, also YouTube is owned by Google. And so, um, all three of those are owned, you know, by the same person people place.

Nick Clason (02:53):
And so the search engine is going to, um, be tied to a Google, uh, a strength of a Google type search engine. So it's, it's not going to be a small bananas like TikTok is trying to, uh, acutely turn themselves into more of a search engine type platform. And like, that's fine, but it's not powered by Google. You know what I mean? It's powered by by TikTok. And so TikTok was good at making vertical viral style videos. YouTube is owned by the largest, best and most powerful search engine in the entire world. So YouTube has some strength and some weight behind it. In addition to that, uh, YouTube has recently, um, burst onto the scene with shorts. I don't know the last time you logged into your mobile app on YouTube, but there'll be a couple of widescreen long form classic YouTube video recommendations, um, in one, two, or three of the first spots.

Nick Clason (03:52):
But then right beneath that is a list of shorts. It's similar to the Instagram app. Now if you're scrolling through all the square pictures, but then it'll suggest some reels. That's what YouTube is now doing with shorts. And about a year or so ago, I, um, I gave up on YouTube shorts cuz I posted a few and they got like one or two likes and or views, like just, it was useless. And, uh, it was the clunkiest between TikTok, Facebook and Instagram and YouTube. Of those four, it was the Clunkiest, uh, to post of all of them. And also it has the shortest window for shorts. So like TikTok now, um, will offer like an up to three minute video. And for some people creators or something, I'm not sure who gets this. Um, some people can post up to like 10 minute videos. So Rios has now got a longer length on Instagram.

Nick Clason (04:44):
However, on Facebook it's shorter, which doesn't make any sense why like those two who are both owned by Meta wouldn't communicate and talk to themselves. Uh, YouTube still only has a one minute, um, clip option. So anytime I'm making any sort of vertical video content, if I want to post it to YouTube, I need to ensure that it's a minute or less. Um, but that's usually not that hard. Um, and so like even yesterday I posted on our, um, TikTok, we did one of those blind rankings. I had, uh, a girl, um, who's one of our worship leaders at our church that leads a lot in our ministry. I had her do a blind ranking of NFL teams based only on the logo. Cause she doesn't know anything about sports. And, uh, I'm dating myself a little bit, but we posted that on Super Bowl Sunday thinking that'd be, you know, like a funny thing to kind of play off of like the Super Bowl thing, vibe or whatever.

Nick Clason (05:35):
Um, and when she recorded it on TikTok, she recorded it for like a minute and 30 seconds. So I had to go and I had to cut it and shave it down. I did that all in the TikTok app. Um, but then when I was able to then take that link and post it on YouTube, it was less than a minute. So I was able to go on YouTube shorts and I had a decision moment there. Do I just post this on, um, TikTok and Instagram reels or do I do the work, cut it, chop it down to be able to get it over to, to YouTube. Here's the interesting thing about that particular video, you never know because especially when you're posting the four platforms, one might like blow up on one and get like one view over on another platform, but in this case, that video performed best on YouTube, believe it or not.

Nick Clason (06:20):
And so from about a year ago when I first started, um, posting on YouTube, they are much more, uh, they've done a lot more work, I think, on their backend to make shorts a little bit more viable. When I first started posting shorts on our churches student ministry YouTube page, we didn't do that until the very first of this year. We were changing our name in 2023. And so I already had the YouTube channel for Cross Creek students. Um, and I didn't want to start a YouTube channel for first Colville students and switch them over. I just, I wanted to get a clean start from everything, logo, handle, the whole thing. Cuz YouTube's the one i, I know the the least, right? I didn't want any issues. And honestly, even like right now, our TikTok is still under at first Colville students because TikTok holds, um, those names longer, um, to let them become available.

Nick Clason (07:14):
I, I already had a Cross Creek students account on TikTok. I owned it. Um, and I deleted it hoping that within 30 days they would give it to me part, not hoping only for hop's sake, but also because that's what they said that they would do. But then when I did more research, if someone deletes their account, they hold it for four months until it becomes available again. Or at least that's what someone said on Reddit somewhere. So we're gonna see, um, one day we'll change that over. But nonetheless, I digress. I didn't start posting on YouTube until January 1st, 2023, uh, because of the name change thing. And it is now, again, dating myself when this was, uh, recorded versus when it's gonna be aired live. But it's February 13th and we have over 70 subscribers on YouTube. We post a once weekly long form video clip.

Nick Clason (08:04):
Um, and so we have maybe 10, I wanna say something like that. Um, long form longer than 10 minute video clips. Um, the rest we just post are normal three day, three a day, um, short form video content that we also posted, TikTok that we also posted to reels we posted over on YouTube. And we have over 70 subscribers that is easily the fastest growing social media platform of all the other platforms that we're using. Um, we are reaching new and different people on YouTube than we are on TikTok than we are on Instagram. TikTok is probably the second fastest growing. Um, and by far the slowest are Instagram and Facebook. They're just, they're not there yet. So what do we do on YouTube? What is my recommended YouTube strategy? Now and foremost, if you're a church and you're already using YouTube as a container or a holder or a storage platform for your live stream Sunday sermon, uh, Sunday services, uh, that's great.

Nick Clason (09:07):
I would recommend continuing to do that. If you're just getting started and you don't have the money or the gear or the infrastructure or the desire or the know-how, or whatever other myriad of reasons why it might be difficult for you to get your service up onto YouTube, then here's what I recommend. Pre film your messages sitting down in front of a camera, very similar to what I'm doing right here. For those of you who are not subscribed to our YouTube channel, we're watching it there. What I am doing now, sitting in front of a camera, talking directly into it, pre film your content, why I talked about this in previous episodes, and so I'll, I'll ensure that I go link to that. I think it was in like a three part episode, so it'll be behind some other stuff, but I'll link to it.

Nick Clason (09:51):
Um, YouTube indexes videos that, uh, and and videos that perform the best are those videos that are between, uh, 12 minutes and 17 minutes. Um, a Sunday sermon, typically 30 to 45 minutes, um, somewhere in that range. And if you're including the worship and the announcements and all the other stuff, you're church service is probably somewhere between an hour and an hour and a half. Um, and YouTube measures and tracks watch time and retention rates and drop off rates. And so the longer your video, that's, that's good. Okay? It's good to have a long video, but if people aren't staying for the whole video, it's gonna actually be a ding against you. The other thing that you get to do with, um, a pre-filed message, uh, is that you get to, you get to make it accustom and, and tailor the message for people online only you all know, and you've all been there, especially as we've moved from Covid d whereas like digital only into back to in person.

Nick Clason (10:56):
You've all probably noticed and known the hybrid struggle that there's been where you're talking to, you know, during Covid, you're talking directly to a camera that worked really well, but then you're talking to a room and also some people behind the camera, and now you're probably talking to a room and less people behind the camera. And so when you pre-filed, you're able to talk directly to the people that you know that are gonna be watching and consuming this on YouTube with your in-person sort of being the secondary or sitting in the back seat of the purpose of that, that video, right? And so, uh, YouTube, you guys know this. You've watched it before. They even like probably make fun of it or make memes out of it, right? But the whole thanks for being here, watch it like it subscribe, make sure you hit that bell.

Nick Clason (11:40):
You can do all of those things when you prefill the message. Why do we do those things? Why do YouTubers do those things? Because they actually work. Believe it or not. Uh, if you just watch a video or someone just as a video versus if you tell them to and subscribe, like comment below, you'll actually see a, a noticeable uptick in those things happening if you just ask them to do it. And so that's one of the advantages of sitting down pre-filing your message. You can make it shorter. Uh, you can make it fit into what's preferred for YouTube. You can speak directly to an online audience, someone that you know is going to be consuming your message in an online forum, an online first type forum. And you can, uh, tailor your message in that that way. All right, so let's get nitty gritty.

Nick Clason (12:28):
So what do I do? What do I use? Uh, so for phones, believe it or not, I'm an Android guy. Um, and so I am filming this video and, and, um, I film all of my other, uh, videos that I pre-filed people with on a Google Pixel Pro seven. That's the one that they, uh, you know, put on, you know, commercials and stuff where you can do the magic eraser, take people out of the background, stuff like that. I tried that last night actually for the very first time I was watching the Super Bowl and they're advertising for it. And I was like, oh yeah, I have that phone. Let me see if I can actually do that. And so I did. Um, but the camera is top of the line for cell phone cameras. Um, it's, it's not a camera camera, right? Um, and so it's, it's got its limitations for sure.

Nick Clason (13:14):
Uh, but it's the phone I also use for my personal use. And so because I use it for my personal use and I use it for my, uh, filming and stuff, I, I invested in it personally so that I can use it for things both at work and stuff like this I'm using for the podcast or whatever. So I just use my cell phone for church has, um, a budget and they're not willing or able or whatever to invest in livestream. Look no further than the camera in your pocket. It is probably better than most, uh, most like most cameras that we had access to even like five years ago. It's crazy. So what do I do after I film it? Well, I use the Adobe Suite Creative Cloud. My church, uh, pays for that. It's like $55 a month. Um, I think for a business license, and let me just say, I think it's worth it.

Nick Clason (14:04):
There are other free programs and you can nickel and dime your way away from those things, but for like editing purposes, it's really helpful and useful. Now, most computer softwares have a free video editing, um, service and you, you can get by with some stuff. Uh, but they're just like, all those free, all those free things are all those things that are not like a part of the, you know, like industry standard. They're just, they're gonna have shortcomings and they're gonna have things that you wish they had that they don't have, or services that they offer that they just aren't able to offer because they're not free. I always think about the time, one of the churches I worked at that I got, I got really into design, um, and like making graphics. That was like one of the things I, I kind of became the Sunday morning slide graphic maker.

Nick Clason (14:50):
Um, and I, I learned how to do all of that in PowerPoint, but then there were just shortcomings. Like I, for example, I couldn't make a round background with transparent outlines around it. Why? Because that's a Photoshop thing, right? And there's some free programs out there that do it. And now even with things like Canva and whatnot, um, that are even much more prominent than when I started doing it. But I remember asking my, my boss to ask the finance committee if we could please spring for the Adobe Creative Cloud, um, Adobe Creative Suite. Um, and he just, he was unwilling to pay the money at the time. And so I was doing a lot of things, but I just, I, there was always limits to what I could do in PowerPoint versus in Photoshop. And so that's what I'll say, yes, you can, Jimmy Rig and Jerry rigger way around a lot of things.

Nick Clason (15:40):
But, um, and sim this is the same conversation by the way we're just having with the camera. Like my cell phone does a fine job, but like, there are still limitations to it. And so there's always a, an upgrade that you can always make. So you just gotta figure out where and how you wanna spend the money. And so, um, we use Adobe Creative, the Adobe Creative Suite in many more facets and, and you know, places than just, uh, for YouTube videos. But I use Adobe Premiere Pro because it, it links really well with the Adobe Photoshop in Adobe After Effects. Um, and I don't use After Effects for every edit. I use it for like, some initial things for some lower thirds and some animated graphics and stuff like that, that I just store and have and put, you know, places when I'm editing.

Nick Clason (16:27):
Um, so I'll, I'll use it like for the first time or for the first few videos to get a a, a library of some things. But for the most part, when I'm editing, I'm just using Adobe Premier, um, pro and Adobe Photoshop. And they, they talk really well together cuz they're both in the same creative cloud. So what did I get? So in addition to my phone, I have like a ring light. Um, I, I bought a tripod, a desk tripod as well as a full standing tripod. Um, and I bought two style microphones. I bought two lapels that connect via Bluetooth. They just plug right into my phone. Um, and I bought a shotgun style microphone that plugs into like the charging port of my phone. And I'll tell you what, what I'll do is I will throw all of those links into the show notes.

Nick Clason (17:16):
Now, keep in mind they are for, um, like Android connections and so if, if you don't have one of those and you have an iPhone or whatever, there are all the same things for iPhones as well. So you can see what I got and you can then, uh, take that and, uh, adjust your recommendation toward, uh, an iPhone thing. And so that microphone, uh, is probably the best investment, I would say of all the things. It just, it has really good quality, it's really easy to use. Um, and it just makes the video sound just a little bit better and a little bit more professional using the microphone. That way it's, it's not a microphone like this, uh, like this podcast mic that I have for those of you watching, um, it plugs directly into my phone and I can shoot it right at whoever, um, is looking at my phone or at the camera.

Nick Clason (18:05):
All right, so then how do I use, uh, then how do I use that strategy for social? So when I'm editing in Adobe Premiere Pro, um, I find two spots to create just vertical video message clips. Um, I clip 'em out. I, I try to find a good hook. If the person, myself or any of our other, uh, people on our team don't have a good hook, I will have them talk for a little bit, pause and I'll fly in some text and I'll do an AI voiceover. Um, and the place that I've been using for that AI voiceover is, um, a place called V V E E V E E d.io, uh, v and also I'll drop that in the show notes as well. Um, and I, all those AI ones similar to what I was saying earlier, uh, they, they require a payment, right?

Nick Clason (18:56):
They require you, like you can get one, but then you gotta start paying if you want more than one per one per week or something like that. I can't remember. Uh, but v do IO so far has been working well, I'm gonna anticipate it one day, it's not gonna work, and I'm gonna have to pay for an AI voice generator. Um, and that's just that classic, like, that's really popular on TikTok right now. I don't know how long that will be, but for right now, that works well as a hook. So like, I might be talking pause, AI voice come in, and then it keeps, uh, and then it plays the rest of the thing and the AI voice works as a hook. And then the rest of the video in under 60 seconds hopefully delivers when you're editing an Adobe Premier Pro, you can create an in and an out by just clicking the I while you're in your sequence and an o for I in and o for out.

Nick Clason (19:44):
And then you can just render that out, um, just that little section. So in that little section, I'll chop it up real a lot. You know, like, I'll make it real quick. Jump cuts, I'll zoom in, zoom out, like for emphasis and whatnot, I'm able to add captions directly in Adobe Premier Pro, um, and, and use it that way. So, uh, that I will chop that up. I'll chop up two of those, and then I'll also do one of those videos I've talked about and, um, with just like stock motion video background in the background, um, motion video background thing with like a tweet tweet looking screenshot over top of it as, as like a quote from the message or a bottom line. And so I'll, I'll use three different sermon style clips, um, sprinkled in and woven in through our social media throughout the week.

Nick Clason (20:32):
So like, we meet on Wednesday nights. So I have one that goes live on Thursday morning from the pre-recorded YouTube video content. I have one that goes on Sunday morning. I usually do that as like the, the quote post. And then I have one that goes on Tuesday, uh, the day before next message would be preached, or our video goes live in the room on a Wednesday night. So that is my, that's how I use my social media strategy. Um, and how I weave that into our schedule. On the end of those social media videos, I use just a YouTube subscribe ender screen. And so this is probably my favorite part is because we pre-filed and have longer form, uh, YouTube messages, if someone does in a discoverability algorithm stumble across our message, it will then, uh, fade to a screen that says, watch the full message on YouTube.

Nick Clason (21:24):
I like that because I think that when there is an actual like strategy or place to push people to, if they do discover you, um, we talked about it in the vi in the u in the podcast last week that a lot of Gen Z more than more than 50% say they use short form platforms to find short form videos of things that they may want to watch longer form of later. And so, uh, I use that and say, Hey, go watch the full message over on YouTube, then go click the link link bio, you know, something like that, uh, to take them to the full message of the short clip that they just watched. And so that's one of the ways that it's not just about going viral, it's not just about vanity metrics. It's not just about getting a lot of views, but it's hopefully about taking people from an awareness of us to consuming some more messages of us or that we are able to produce.

Nick Clason (22:19):
Now, this is my favorite part because our podcast is called Hybrid Ministry, but what are ways that we use this in a hybrid style? So I say we pre-record, um, and so we do a message on Wednesday Night Live. We pre-record it, um, post it on YouTube when we meet on Sunday mornings, uh, well actually first when we meet on Wednesday nights, we provide a you version live events, uh, event on, on their phones so they can navigate and interact in you version that can take notes, they can read the, the scripture, they can follow along with the outline basically. But then at the end of it, you can push and produce some external links. So a lot of times I will link to a short, a YouTube short, um, or a long form YouTube video that relates to the topic that we're teaching with.

Nick Clason (23:07):
So that's a way that something that we're do, that someone's experiencing in the room, they can experience a hybrid relationship with us, with our social media, with our platforms, um, through that YouVersion events. The other thing that we do is on Sunday mornings, um, our students all come in for a big into the auditorium for a big look announcement time, real quick, five, 10 minutes, not, not much longer. And then we break them out into the small groups all throughout the building. Um, what we're able to do, because our Sunday morning small group ties to our Wednesday night message is now that we're pre-filing, I've been pulling a minute or two clip from the message, um, and playing it. And so like I've told you before, we have a team of three. And so oftentimes whoever is teaching on Wednesday is not the person doing announcements or, or hosting the room on Sunday morning.

Nick Clason (24:01):
Um, and so, and like yesterday, uh, my boss, he preached on Wednesday and we played his clip and he's on vacation, but he was still able to, you know, uh, tee up the morning and, and still give a moment of spiritual influence to the entire room because we're using this message, uh, that we've already, we already have in the can. We already pre-filed it, it already exists somewhere. So for those kids who don't get, don't come on Wednesday and don't get to hear him speak ever, um, it's an opportunity to to introduce them to him, to introduce him to, to introduce them to his style, for them to hear from him. Not just in giving announcements, but also in giving the actual message content. Finally, my favorite reason for not sleeping on YouTube and the added benefit of pre-filing is it gets you into your content sooner and it gives you, uh, just an opportunity to prep, um, before you're gonna take it live to your room before you're gonna stand up and preach it.

Nick Clason (25:04):
And so I think it's valuable that you're not flying in hot on a Wednesday, having, uh, just printed something from a pre-canned curriculum and then just grabbing the outline notes. I think it's good to have ingested it, digested it, um, wrestled with it, interacted with it, and so then by the time you get up there, you're more familiar with it, it's gonna probably be delivered much more naturally because you have a familiarity with your outline and with your message as opposed to just you seeing it now for the first time. And doing it this way, we've pre-filed our messages on the Thursday before they're preached. And so our people are interacting with the message, um, the whole week before they even get up and preach live. And so by the time they get up there, it's gonna be locked in, in their brains and their hearts, hopefully at a lot better level, uh, just by the forced nature of needing to be ready to pre film their YouTube content.

Nick Clason (26:05):
Well, hey everyone, I am thrilled that you stuck around to the end. Thanks so much for hanging out. Uh, if you found this helpful, please share it, rate it, drop a like, uh, all kinds of stuff. All those things help us do better indexing on YouTube in the podcast algorithms and whatever and whatnot. Uh, and so that would be greatly appreciated out of us as a token of our appreciation, we have created a couple of free resources for you. So if you head to the link in the show notes and go grab the, uh, TikTok, uh, have I ruined my TikTok account for doing that. We will also throw in our completely free social media checklist, what you need to be asking yourself every time you post to every platform. Um, but what we don't have on that one is YouTube. You know why? Because when I created it, I was sleeping on YouTube.

Nick Clason (26:53):
Don't sleep on YouTube. It's gonna be helpful, beneficial, it's the largest search engine of all the social medias that we have out there. And it is, it is worth investing in. So regardless of where your church is big, small, have a lot of money, have a lot of gear, don't like, there is a way to make it happen. So I would recommend getting in there, create it, make it hybrid. There are more ways to flush even that hybridization out. But for now, go back and listen to everything I just said for what we're doing to live and lean into a hybrid, digital, physical environment to help point our students closer to Jesus. Again, thanks so much for hanging out. Uh, follow me on, uh, TikTok, follow me on YouTube, uh, subscribe to this podcast and we will be sure to talk next time. Don't forget, stay hybrid.

How does the church shift the way it approaches ministry, not to diminsh or downplay the unchangable truths or things of Scripture, but to best set them up for relevance with Gen Z, Millenials and the next Generation of Church attenders? Listen or watch to find out!

SHOWNOTES
YouTube Trends Report: https://www.youtube.com/trends/report/
Nick on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9pjecCnd8FVFCenWharf2g
Nick on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@clasonnick
Nick's Podcast: https://www.hybridministry.xyz
Full Transcript of this Show: https://www.hybridministry.xyz/032

TIMECODES
00:00-00:54 Intro
00:54-03:27 2022 YouTube Trends Report
03:27-06:22 What does all of this mean?
06:22-11:35 The Pop Culture Formation Formula
11:35-18:07 Creating Community Creativity
18:07-23:11 Multi Format Creativity
23:11-25:18 Response Creativity
25:18-28:26 The Future Exists in Dialogue of Digital Communities
28:26-32:09 The Digital and Hybrid Implications for the church moving into 2023
32:09-34:18 Outro

TRANSCRIPT
Nick Clason (00:03):
Well, what is up everybody? Welcome to another episode of the Hybrid Ministry podcast, and now on YouTube. Excited to be with you all. We're gonna test out a couple of video options here. See how these go. I know it'll go fine. Mostly I'm testing to see how much extra work it's gonna be. But would love to have you join us over there if you want to check out for video stream as well. Something that is just another option. So we have audio, we have video, um, but everything, the home base for it is hybridministry.xyz of course, cuz hybridministry.com was taken. So I'm your host, Nick Clason, excited to be with you. And in today's episode, what I actually wanted to discuss was this idea of why should churches even care about digital and hybrid ministry? Like what is the purpose?

Nick Clason (01:03):
We all saw the pitfalls downfalls and the reasons why digital ministry was not a good example. Um, it was not a good thing, um, during Covid. And so we are now past Covid. We're able to live in a more semi-normal world. Why in the world should churches even care about digital? So let's go ahead and let's get this episode underway. So let's talk about some assumptions, right? Like, I think that there are some general social media specific assumptions that say that social media is void of relationship, right? Like, the point of it is, I, I I don't know, right? Like the point of it is maybe to to post, uh, post some announcements, um, and try and drum up some external, some marketing, um, marketing, so to speak, uh, examples of people who might not go to our church and we want to get them connected to our church.

Nick Clason (02:08):
But there's an assumption that like the real, the main thing that's gonna work is gonna be relationships of people to people inviting one another. Let me just say that, um, I've been doing student ministry social media now for 12 years, and never once has anyone of the accounts that I've ever run really gone viral, so to speak. Like we've never had more than like an inordinate amount of followers, never had more like a thousand followers. I have had a couple Instagram accounts with more than a thousand followers, but honestly like, that was not from anything that I, or we were doing. That was more an inherited thing where the Instagram account already had a high level of followers and we were just sort of like the beneficiaries of that account already having a lot of followers. So my point is nothing we did really drummed up a lot of outside interest.

Nick Clason (03:03):
Okay. And so this assumption that social media is not relationship based and you know, the purpose of it is to, you know, get people from the outside looking in. Yeah, I mean, yeah, that is, I think that's, I think that's a benefit. I think that, um, like we said in the last episode, the church is in a unique intersection where what you post can be both discovered by the people that go to your church, but also because of the new discovery algorithms, which this is probably why in my 12 years we haven't seen this, because these new algorithms that are being made famous by TikTok and then adopted by Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube on reels and shorts are, um, new. Like this is a new territory for churches because previously your people followed your pages and your accounts, and if you wanted more people to follow it, you had to pay for it.

Nick Clason (03:52):
And I've, I have never done that. And so my accounts never really did that, where there were like a lot of people coming to discover our accounts. And so now we are in a unique intersection where people might actually discover your church. And what's more interesting is that all of these algorithms, there's a uniqueness where they start out geographically local. So first the algorithm from what we've learned is they're pumped out to your followers, which are then pumped out to their followers, which are then pumped out to the, uh, like your geographical region, which is why a lot of times you can geotag your posts on Instagram, on TikTok, and so you can put your city, and so the people in your city might be exposed to your information first, and then beyond that it'll, you know, go to the state and viral and whatever the case might be.

Nick Clason (04:44):
But, but the reality is, the, the closer that you are, the more likely that the people around you are gonna find it. And so therefore, if people in your geographical region are discovering your videos, there is an actual chance that they might hear the message of Jesus from you and then take a step to become a visitor or a first timer at your church. I mean, wouldn't that be amazing? Wouldn't that, wouldn't that be one of the goals that we're looking for here? Um, and again, like I said, I haven't experienced that in a lot of cases, and I think that's because that really wasn't an option up here until very recently. Um, however, there's still the argument that like, no one's gonna come to our church based off of that. And that might be true. And I think that it depends on your style of church, if you're, um, a more of an outreach centric church that you want that.

Nick Clason (05:34):
And so you're gonna be more gung-ho about this idea. And if you're more of a discipleship centric church, which tends to be a little more inward facing, um, not because you believe that that's more valuable and more important, but that just tends to be the vibe, um, that comes with it, then you are gonna prioritize some of those relationships more over, um, like, like cold leads or, or, you know, top of a funnel marketing type of terminology to borrow from the secular world. So, um, all that to be said, there's this assumption, there's this notion that social media, um, and social ministry is void of real relationships. And I would just, I would debunk that and say that I think that that's not entirely true. Um, I agree to a point that it can be done that way and, um, that, that this ministry, that this focus in your church needs some very particular and very, um, deliberate attention.

Nick Clason (06:34):
Like it cannot just, in my personal opinion, it cannot be put on autopilot anymore. It cannot be put on the back burner. There needs to be a person more than a volunteer and more than someone's like, uh, section of their full-time hours devoted to social media. Like you probably need a full-on person, um, not someone to do double duty. Like, like even right now, um, I am a youth pastor, but I'm like on a team of three and of the three, I'm the one tasked with digital and video and social media, website, whatever, right? Like that in and of itself is a full-time job. And sometimes my youth ministry duties have actually, like, you know, this week I had to make calls to interview students about baptism, um, and we're onboarding a bunch of new students to volunteer. Like sometimes those things feel like they're in the way of my digital stuff and that, that's out of balance for me personally.

Nick Clason (07:34):
Um, but that's my point in saying that this digital of it's all consuming, it just takes up such a gigantic portion and it it is vast and it is huge. And, um, and there's a lot of opportunity and there's a lot of potential. And so to just dump it on someone as like a, hey, 10 hours of your week, like it's, that is so hard. It's gonna be very difficult for that person to be able to, you know, to make, to make, uh, that 10 hours work for them the way that you're probably hoping that it would work. So in Covid, right, we learned that we're not built to be completely isolated. And so just social, um, and that's, that's the whole, that's the whole origin of this podcast is I felt like we were debating, um, when I started this podcast in late 2022, I guess mid 2022, um, we were debating between in-person ministry and digital ministry, especially where I was, we had, we were still working and operating out of a lot of the rules that we had built for C O V with the show that we had made for C O V D.

Nick Clason (08:38):
Like, we hadn't let that go. We were still producing it weekly. Um, and we had found a way to pivot from strictly online to a more in-person model where groups watched it in host homes. Um, and then they discussed the, the message afterwards. And I thought it was incredibly ingenious and innovative. Um, but there were a lot of people in our church that that didn't, and they were ready to just quote unquote go back. And, you know, we had a, a marketing guy, and if you listen to some of our first, I think like seven episodes, um, Matt was actually the co-host of this podcast. Uh, we both made cross-country moves. And, um, I, I don't know what happened to him. I never got him back, really. I mean, we still talk, but he would keep saying like, yeah, yeah, I just gotta get my computer set up, gotta get my computer set up.

Nick Clason (09:22):
And eventually I was like, all right, Matt's not getting his computer set up. I'm just, I I got a produce weekly episode, so I can't wait on him anymore, right? So, uh, here we are and I'm just kinda doing this thing. Anyway, besides point Matt marketing, honestly, genius guru in my opinion. He said, the world we live in is now hybrid. In fact, Barna did a study, we did a couple episodes on it, I'll link to them in the show notes, um, did a couple episodes on the findings that we found from Barna study, and they, they titled it the, the state of hybrid church or something like that. And what it said, what it found was that especially the younger generations, the generations that are going to be filling our pews and churches here in the next couple years, gen Z and millennials said a hybrid, um, version of church is going to suit them very well.

Nick Clason (10:11):
What that often scares us with on two fronts is, number one, it feels like we're shifting away from in person. And I think a lot of times in person, and I've talked about this multiple times, I think a lot of times in person, room or moment or feeling is for the, the vanity of the pastor, and not even in like a sinful or bad way, but just like, man, getting up in front of a room full of people feels really good and you feel like you feel like you've done something and you've been somewhere and there's, there's a shot of like adrenaline into your like arm every time you get up there to preach. Even I, I find myself like finding more value from preaching to a live room of, of humans with interaction, um, like just, you know, face-to-face interaction. Um, then I, then I do from a, a TikTok video that goes viral wave over like 3000 something views.

Nick Clason (11:02):
Like, it just, it doesn't feel the same. And I get it. And you know what? I don't know that it is the same. I think you have a much more captive audience, even in a room of a few hundred than you do, um, with a, a short form under 62nd video that that has over a thousand something views, right? All that to be said, I'm not proposing that, that you throw one quote unquote baby out with a bathwater. We live in a hybrid world, right? So I found this stat incredibly fascinating. 76% of American surveyed ha uh, have a friend that they've met online only they've never met in person. Right? Now, you might be thinking, how is that possible? Again, if you're older, think younger generations gaming and, and you know, chat rooms and whatever and whatnot. Like of course in the nineties chat rooms were pedophiles want to hang out, and they probably still do, right?

Nick Clason (11:55):
But, but 76% of Americans have a friend in some way, shape or form gaming social media that they've never met in person. Like I have an anecdotal real example. I have a friend named Dan that, um, for the first three to six months of our life, or not life of our relationship life, , uh, it was strictly online. Uh, many of you know I've told this story, but I started at my last church on day one of Covid and went immediately into lockdown. So the number of real live human beings at my church that I met was very, very small. The number of real life human beings that I met on Zoom after that was very, very large. And, um, you know, I had met a decent number of the staff, at least from my interview or on my first day on the job, but then to meet other people.

Nick Clason (12:49):
And Dan was a, just a regular church attender volunteer who led a, a hybrid, not hybrid, actually strictly online small group. I had a relationship with Dan. Um, and, and he even said, he's like, you are like the poster child for me, or the poster example of what it looks like for somebody who, uh, says like, you can't make friends with someone online. He's like, we totally made friends, you know, with each other online. And so these are examples, both empirical data. 76% of Americans say, I have a friend with someone who's completely online. And even in my own life, like I would say I had a real relationship with him, um, it would've been great to be sitting in the same living room or whatever, but at the same time, you know what, every Tuesday night, I just got my laptop out in the comfort of my own home brew, a cup of my own coffee that I personally enjoyed more than like a cake cup that someone was gonna gimme at their house.

Nick Clason (13:49):
And we sat down for small group. And you know, what was funny was like our church would do this thing where like you'd watch the live stream on YouTube, and this was the archetype for our student ministry. The group's team of course, stole it, but we'd watch the video on YouTube, and then everyone would log in to their campus specific zooms via a link in the description, and then a moderator there would break everyone out into breakout rooms. So they would sort of have control over the entire call, and then they would give a warning after like an hour or so that all the groups would, uh, be, be closing down by the moderator who's just literally sitting there out in the waiting room, just kinda waiting for people to be kicked out of their breakout rooms and reassign them or whatever. Super boring job I've done a million times youth ministry.

Nick Clason (14:33):
Uh, so a couple times those ended and we, our entire small group just jumped off and got into our very own room, and had group until like 11 or 12. We weren't, you know, at that point we weren't talking about spiritual stuff. We were just joking around, goofing off, having fun, whatever, right? My point is, relationships can exist in an online space. You just have to be deliberate. You just have to be intentional, and you have to be able, willing, willing to massage those relationships. So let's talk about, um, some hybrid ways that relationships can exist.

Nick Clason (15:14):
So some of you might know this, um, but a couple weeks ago, my, my wife's mom, my mother-in-law, uh, passed away from a two plus year long battle with cancer. It was, it was rough, man, like, not gonna lie, but, um, the thing I wanna kind of extract or highlight is the moment that the day that she passed away and that it became more public because of social media. Again, another example, um, my phone was flooded with text messages. My wife's phone was flooded like threefold, tenfold with text messages. Um, every single one of those people were people that we had met in person at one moment in time or another, whether they be a family member, whether they'd be a friend, whether they'd be a former colleague or work associate from another job that we'd been at. They'd all been people we'd met in real life person before.

Nick Clason (16:12):
However, the relationship at that moment existed in a hybrid space. Very few people in that exact moment were with us. I mean, I, I had to drive from Texas all the way back to Ohio, so the only people with me were me and my two kids. Um, and her, she was with her sister and with some family friends, and then everybody else reached out and provided love and care and support via text message that that is an example of a hybrid relationship. You know what I mean? Um, and, and some people were people that I work with now at the church I'm at at now. Other people were people I worked, worked with in the past that reached out either way, right? Like they're all people I knew, but they're all showing up for me in a hybrid way. So, uh, I wanna talk about a few, uh, examples of like other businesses that we might interact with in the world in with hybrid sort of interactions.

Nick Clason (17:22):
Let's dive in examples of real life hybrid interactions. My favorite of this is Home Depot, right? I interact with Home Depot at the store level. I drive up, I go into the store, I grab 98 cents of plumbing tape, right? Uh, that's an example of me interacting with Home Depot at a physical level. Okay? All right. So another example of course is me interacting with Home Depot at an online level. I might go on the website and I might see how much of a certain item is in stock that, but I'm not in the store. I'm completely in my house. I'm looking at all my computer on the app, but the, the app actually is my favorite feature. When I'm in the store. I almost never, like, if I walk around in the store for like more than two minutes and I can't figure out where an item might be, I immediately pull up the app, which often I've uninstalled from my phone, so I reinstall it.

Nick Clason (18:25):
Then I like, almost, the first thing I do when I walk into Home Depot is begin to reinstall the Home Depot app, find my local Home Depot, the one I'm physically standing in, and then I look that item up, whatever it is, to try and find it, and then it'll tell me exactly where it is, what aisle, what bay, and how many more they have in stock. I love that feature. That's hybrid. I'm in person, I'm in the store, but I'm interacting with a digital piece of technology, uh, you know, for my relationship with Home Depot. Another o another example is a dentist office, right? You go to a physical visit. But I love when a service like this has a great website, especially for being able to book appointments or being able to reach out. This last week, I brought my car to an auto mechanic shop.

Nick Clason (19:13):
I called them, not there, called them, right? That's an example of me from my house calling them. That's old school technology. You get it right? Then I show up, I'm in their office. But then when I was done, you know what they did? They sent me a text message to let me know that my car was ready. You see all these things, and I, I think like in a lot of ways, like when we talk about digitization or hybridization of church and of ministry, we don't even know what that looks like. So right now, in a lot of ways that's social media, that's video content, but the reality is like, some of this is uncharted territory. So for 2023, for right now, for someone just starting out, what are some examples? What are some ways that your church can live and exist in hybrid ministry?

Nick Clason (20:01):
All right, so like I said, I think a little bit of this is like pioneering uncharted territory, pilgrim's progress. Like, we don't know some of these answers, but, um, what are some examples of ways that your church can, uh, live and and be hybrid? So the first one is probably the most obvious one, and probably the easiest one, I would say is your Sunday sermon. Okay? So what are ways that your Sunday sermon can exist in a hybrid space? Well, first and foremost, right? You can, while someone is sitting in the auditorium, they can interact with and engage with your sermon notes, or they can interact and engage with, um, some self-guided like outlines or ways for them to take notes. So, like in my church, my pastor puts his notes on our church app. Um, it's honestly, it's essentially probably the manuscript that he's up there preaching with as I've looked at it.

Nick Clason (20:58):
Like, it's very thorough. Um, and my guess is that that's like a, that's a workload decision, right? Like he already built this. So if he just copy, if, if they or someone just copy and paste and put this into the app, uh, that's not that much more work for him. My personal favorite example is the you version events feature. So in everyone's you version Bible app that most people have downloaded on their phones, if not, definitely recommend it. Cause again, it's another way to interact with people in a hybrid way. Um, there's an events tab that you can create, like a self-guided sort of outline, and then people can, can take and add notes to certain headers or certain bible verses, um, that, that are related to or interact with the passage. And then they can also link out to like videos or other, like further discussions.

Nick Clason (21:51):
One of the things I try to do is I try to challenge myself to add one option of a, a link out from a u version event for deeper study or for more information, or for a longer YouTube video that I didn't, you know, didn't have time to show or didn't have time to look like fully, you know, unpack. I try to challenge myself to do that every week. Again, to just think hybrid, right? Brady Shearer has made this phrase famous, but the other, the additional 167 hours of somebody's week. So then beyond that moment, beyond that Sunday service, um, you can of course rip out the audio. Um, if you're already live streaming, um, you can have live stream, you can post those videos to YouTube. You can, uh, long form podcast content on a podcast feed. That's a way for it to be hybrid.

Nick Clason (22:45):
And then finally, ways for that to live on and, and find its way into that, that intersection of your church, people being reminded of the message and people from outside your church may be discovering and stumbling upon your message are short form Instagram reels, TikTok videos, YouTube shorts. Um, if you're already live streaming your content, you're sitting on a goldmine of social media content. You don't have to, uh, come up with as much social media content as you did in the past. You already have it. You have the short, or you have the long form video. Clip it up into minute segments. Find a good hook, get a good editor. And, uh, hey, if you don't have a good editor, but you're interested in it, reach out. Um, I'm interested in, uh, starting something, you know, kind on the side for myself to be doing this and serving churches in that, that way.

Nick Clason (23:38):
Um, I don't exactly have a framework for that or what that looks like. Hit me up on dms, on TikTok, or, you know, reach out to me via YouTube, all those links in the show notes@hybridministry.xyz. What about groups? What about relationships? How do you hybridize relationships, right? Because that's sort of the basis for this whole thing, is that social isn't, isn't built on relationships. And I would agree with that in the nitty gritty. Like when, you know, when my mother-in-law passes away, I want someone to really show up for me or really call me or really, you know, text me, um, not just, you know, interact with them at a, at a digital or social social media type level, right? But for a lot of people, the discovering of groups or finding their place or finding their people, that's half of the battle. And so if your church does not have some sort of group finder, I, I would highly recommend doing that.

Nick Clason (24:36):
If your church is about groups in some way, shape, or form that are open that people opt themselves into, then get yourself a group finder, a catalog, if you will, of the options available at your church for people to find and discover real authentic community. Because you and I know that community is really what changes things. It's what takes a church from their church to my church. So get on a group finder of some way, shape, or form. And then once you're in those groups, here are other ways that, that those groups exist and live in a hybrid sort of sense. You might use a infrastructure like Facebook group, you might use a GroupMe, you might use a group chat, or you might use some other tool feature that someone's gonna develop down the road. Maybe I'll do it and get rich, I don't know.

Nick Clason (25:23):
But, um, for the groups to have some sort of calendar of events, a place for them to have message boards with announcements, um, text messages to interact back and forth, prayer requests, all kinds of different stuff, but a place for the group to live beyond when the group meets, right? Again, the other 167 hours of that group's relationship. When is that? Where is that? When does that take place? The last area, so we talked about sermons, we talked about relationships. Now let's talk about information. You know, uh, churches more than just information people are distilled down to more than just the information that they, uh, put into their brains, okay? But like another example of ways that, that things can exist in a hybrid sort of way is some classes. So you already have your Sunday morning service. You probably already have groups. People probably can't devote too many more hours to the church, but maybe they do want to grow.

Nick Clason (26:24):
Maybe they want to grow in their knowledge of theology, or maybe they want to grow in, in a specific topic. Um, a dating marriage, right? Whatever the case might be. Your church with the 40 hours a week in your office can film some content and, and put up a catalog or a library of courses, like on a website or on an app, six week course, eight week course, something like that. So again, if someone's really committed, they may not have the time to drive back over to your church and sit through a class, find childcare, all the things. But once the kids go to bed, if they wanna pull up in their laptop and learn more, grow more in the area of theology, love, dating, marriage, spiritual gifts, right? Like you name it, you can offer a library of some of those content. I mean, products already sort of exist for that right now for churches, right now.

Nick Clason (27:14):
Media is an example of it. Um, but again, I've found that to be more small groupy content. So you can create something, you, if there's a need, you can scratch that itch, a leadership type academy. And you might even have like a leadership academy for high level leaders in your, in your, um, organization in your church that come together every so often in person. But then after they come together, if the primary goal of it is, is information and knowledge, um, and then, and information transfer, you can accomplish that for sure. You can accomplish that in a hybrid sort of way. Um, more than just short form video sermon content. You can provide short form, social media, TikTok, YouTube type content. Um, like about any topic right now, I'm doing like a little bit of a theology 1 0 1, like a deep dive into like certain areas and elements.

Nick Clason (28:06):
Um, and I'm putting posting on TikTok two times a week. It's a little mini-series that people probably just like randomly scrolling through, aren't gonna notice that they're all like interwoven and connected together. But in my mind they are. And so anyone who sees it, they're, they're gonna learn something more about God or about Jesus, or about creation or about salvation, or about the Holy Spirit or whatever the case might be. Um, because I don't have time to always get into all that, right? Like whatever our series is that's sort of driving and dictating, um, what's, what's being taught from the platform. But there are other necessary things that I think people, my students need to know that I don't have time for it, but this is a way that I can create time for it in the other hours of the week. Um, there are also examples and ways to do longform, you know, uh, styles not just short form.

Nick Clason (28:57):
So audio podcasts are huge. A lot of adults, something like 80 something percent of adults listen to three hours of podcasts a week. So, um, I think, um, Mariners, like Eric Geiger out of Mariners is doing a phenomenal job because the thing I love about him is he's conservative theologically for sure. Um, and so he's not just like out there trying to like get vanity metrics or whatever, right? But the thing he's doing is he's, he's finding ways to use the technology to teach deeper, more robust, you know, truth. And so he's doing a thing like, uh, a podcast called like the, the things that didn't make it into the sermon. Basically, if you're a pastor and you've done this before, you know that you, you prepare a load of content, but then you have to start cutting to get it down to a certain minute mark, right?

Nick Clason (29:46):
So he's doing a podcast on all the things he had to cut from his sermon, um, once a week to just dive deeper into more information. Um, and I, I think that that's brilliant. You know, I think that's a brilliant way, uh, to just add more value to the, the people in your church's, you know, life. Um, and if they're interested in it, that's great. A couple years ago, we, back when Facebook Live was a really big thing, me and another pastor on my staff, we sat, sat down for a thing called Tuesdays at two, and we just, uh, unpacked the sermon from sort of our eyes and our, our vantage point, you know? Um, and we would just have a conversation, um, as sort of interview style. And I mean, he was a licensed biblical counselor, so, uh, he was just a wealth of knowledge.

Nick Clason (30:31):
And so I, I almost operated more like as the host, and I would just toss him questions and let him sort of like unpack and untangle, you know, take the, the theology or the, the preaching and, and bring it down to more of like a boots on the ground level. At least. At least that was the goal. So all kinds of like ideas out there of ways that you can service and serve your congregation in a hybrid sort of way that is not void of relationship, that is meaningful and that people in your church will take advantage of. You just have to think hybrid. So I'd encourage you lean into it. Like I said, we're on the, a little bit the pioneering front because we had solutions for digital pre covid. It was mostly live streaming your service. Then in C O V I D, we all went full bore into it, and it was uncomfortable and unfamiliar.

Nick Clason (31:24):
So once restrictions lifted, we went back to what was familiar. Many of us went back to what was familiar, and I'll just encourage you to not abandon some of those things, but, but listen for and look for ways that you can show up in the other hours of your church members weeks. Those are gonna be what's important and valuable to them. Well, hey everyone, if you found this, uh, podcast helpful, please share it with a friend. Help us get the word out, hybrid ministry.xyz. We provide complete full show transcripts for every single episode that we've ever produced. Also, head to the blog section of that and you can grab our free social media checklist, what to do every time you post a social media, and our free complete guide to posting a TikTok from scratch, from start to finish. That is on there. And again, we are on YouTube now at this episode being the first one. Hey, to everyone on YouTube, check that out if you will get a link for that as in the show notes. And until next time, talk to y'all later. Stay hybrid.

SHOWNOTES
HUBSPOT ARTICLE REFERENCED:
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/short-form-video-trends?utm_campaign=Marketing%252520Blog%252520-%252520Daily%252520Emails&utm_medium=email&utm_content=219842216&utm_source=hs_email

TIMECODES
00:00-02:26 Intro and Short Form Video Trends
02:26-03:56 Why Short Form is the most effective
03:56-07:16 What htis means for church services
07:16-11:08 How churches can use trendy content
11:08-14:04 Brand Challenges
14:04-17:46 Use of Influencers
17:46-24:06 Product Teasers
24:06-26:38 User Generated Content
26:38-29:57 Behind the Brand Videos
29:57-34:13 More Educational Videos
34:13-37:31 What plaforms should we use besides TikTOk and Reels?
37:31-38:29 Outro

TRANSCRIPT
Nick Clason (00:01):
What is up everybody. Welcome to episode eight of the hybrid ministry podcast with me as always on these glorious mornings, Matt Johnson sipping his coffee. Matt, what type of coffee are you drinking this morning?

Matt Johnson (00:17):
Uh, I am drinking a local light roast from around here that supports, um, kid cancer whenever you buy it. So, wow,

Nick Clason (00:28):
Dude, you're such, you're such a good citizen of the world.

Matt Johnson (00:33):
Don't know about that, but you know, I love good cause

Nick Clason (00:36):
Is it, is it hot or ice this morning?

Matt Johnson (00:39):
It's hot this morning cuz I was in a rush. So I just, you know, grinded up my beans and threw it in the Keurig real quick.

Nick Clason (00:45):
Nice. Um, well I don't, I don't know if mine supports anything, but I roasted it yesterday in my garage. So there you go. There's that I guess

Matt Johnson (00:55):
Supports you.

Nick Clason (00:56):
Yeah, it does.

Matt Johnson (00:58):

Nick Clason (00:59):
And I, so I, we were at summer camp two weeks ago and I roasted a gigantic batch. Um, and I brought it to camp and I thought I was gonna be safe, but then all the leaders wanted to try my, my freshly roasted coffee, which is fine. I wanted to, you know, I wanted to share with the people, but that's the yesterday was the first time I'd roasted since camp, cuz I I'd just, you know, it was my birthday in between there. So I got a couple bags of coffee. So I've been been using that. So here we go. No one cares, but that's, that's the low down on my coffee situation.

Matt Johnson (01:30):
I love your coffee situation.

Nick Clason (01:32):
well today, uh, we wanted to talk about short form video trends because we haven't talked about short form video enough, right?

Matt Johnson (01:44):
Nope. Not even close.

Nick Clason (01:45):
No. Well, and even though we have it's, it is everything right now on social media and on the internet. And so we wanted to, um, we have, there's a, a HubSpot article that came out a couple of weeks or months ago and I wanted I'll link that in the show notes. So you guys can check that out hybrid ministry.xyz, but also, uh, I wanted to go through that and then kind of bring some of the, bring some of our like church ideas kind of into that. So mm-hmm so that's what we're gonna be talking about today. Um, so let's just dive into it. You ready?

Matt Johnson (02:24):
I'm ready.

Nick Clason (02:25):
Let's do it. So, uh, the first thing is that 85% of marketers say that short form video are the most effective format of video on social media. Well actually mm-hmm, not even video most

Matt Johnson (02:40):
Effective just general

Nick Clason (02:41):
Format on social media, 85%. That's crazy. Mm-hmm what are those other 15% even trying to say? Do you know

Matt Johnson (02:50):
Um, the other 15% aren't being seen I'll tell you that, um, I've even seen people that are doing static images as videos now. So that's kind, that's just kinda the world we're in.

Nick Clason (03:03):
So they literally post like a JPEG and turn it into a video.

Matt Johnson (03:08):
Yeah. So they'll like, you know, fade in the text or whatever. And you're like, this is literally just a static image with text that fades in

Nick Clason (03:15):
all all to be seen by short form video. Is that just because the algorithms have changed? Is that because of the popularity of TikTok? Is that like what what's behind that? Do you feel,

Matt Johnson (03:27):
Uh, it's a hundred percent TikTok. Um, you can see every big, uh, organization has been trying to mimic TikTok. You saw it with Instagram, with reels, YouTube was shorts, um, Facebook with their promotion of just video in general. So it immediately, once TikTok blew up the way it did. Cause it's been a long time since we've seen a social media channel grow as quickly as TikTok did. Yeah. Everyone had to get back on board with it.

Nick Clason (03:56):
Yeah. It says there's a quote in here that says the growth of social media is causing the human tension span to become shorter and shorter. So leveraging the power of short form video content will give you a leg up on the competition and help you engage your audience. And so mm-hmm, what, like, do you feel like that is a threat to, uh, the traditional in room church gathering 35 minute sermon model

Matt Johnson (04:27):
A hundred percent. Yeah. That's something that I don't think we're talking enough about as a church. Um, instead of actually, you know, trying to cater to this, you know, new generation, uh, millennial, gen Z gen alpha that are their short, their attention spans are shortening we've I've noticed church sermons are getting longer or um, oh, we'll just have more production into it, you know, more lights, more action. But um, if you're live experience, isn't on par with, uh, you know, like a big live concert almost at this point or short, you're not gonna be able to capitalize on it. So just an unfortunate world we are in right now. But uh, I think there's some creative solutions that we could figure out and that some of these tasks out there can help us figure out.

Nick Clason (05:13):
Yeah. How, how do like where's the line though? You know, like where's the line on, like we need to cater to them versus like, you know, preaching, biblical content is still meaningful and important and we should still do that as well. You know what I mean? Like when I feel like that probably just has to happen at every church's, uh, like value level, they just have to have that conversation and be like, well, this is what the world is seeing, but this is where like we're gonna stake our claim or whatever, you know? Cause I do think we can get into a slippery slope there and just be like, well, sermons are gone, you know? And I dunno that we're trying to, I dunno that we're trying to say that either. You know what I mean? I think that we should be, be cognizant of where that, where that line is.

Matt Johnson (05:59):
I think the big thing that people, and this is a way bigger tangent than what we had planned on, but

Nick Clason (06:05):
For sure, I didn't even know we were going this way.

Matt Johnson (06:08):
I think a big thing that we're at to figure out as, uh, as churches is just what, what is that next iteration of the sermon that we can figure out? So I don't think we need, you should at all straight away from biblical teaching and biblical truth. And if you're shying away from talking about Jesus at your church, I strongly feel like you're failing as a church. Like yeah, people wanna hear about Jesus when they're at church, they wanna hear about the Bible, it's the way you deliver it. So I just think we have to start kind of figuring out what, uh, your sermon 2.0 would be like, and I do not have a solution for that at all. Um, you know, someone will figure it out and they'll blow up and we'll all go and then everyone will copy them for the next 10 years. So

Nick Clason (06:55):
Yeah, but in the meantime, like there are solutions to the, the hybrid kind of side of it, right? The, what happens, what happens Monday through Saturday, the days you're not in the auditorium the days you're not at church and that's really where kind of this article comes in. So mm-hmm, uh, they say that this, this article also has another stat, says 63% of marketers say that trendy content related to cultural moments and news stories generate the most video engagement. So that's really what that's saying. If I'm understanding that statistic correctly is just that like things that are relevant tend to perform the most. Like if it copies a, if it copies a trend or if it copies a dance or if it copies a, a song that, or, you know, a sound that's going viral, like those are the ones that perform better on average

Matt Johnson (07:48):
Mm-hmm . Yep. Yep. Definitely. So that's something you gotta keep in mind too. So that is the majority still. It's not like the, um, it's not like 75% though. 63%. That's a still, that's a pretty good percentage of people that, of your content that should be probably more trendy relevant rather than just original stuff that you're trying to get relevant.

Nick Clason (08:11):
Yeah. And that's gonna require someone to kind of have their finger on the pulse of that. You're not just going to like pull open TikTok and like no trends.

Matt Johnson (08:21):
Uh, yeah. And that's, that's gonna be the biggest challenge. Yeah. Mm-hmm

Nick Clason (08:25):
Yeah. So who is that person? And there's probably, there's probably a young person in your church that, that does know that, you know, whoever you are listening to this, whether that's you or you're in leadership at your church, like that's a, that's a, there's a person out there that you can probably delegate that to, or at least tap into their knowledge. Cuz I actually, you know, this is the, here's a great case study for this. So I post on TikTok all the time, uh, at our church and I was posting and um, these students of mine were like, you should do this. And I was like, no, no. I was like, this is what's working on our TikTok. And I'd like, told them this thing. They're like, what? I can't remember. They basically like, no you're wrong. We just need to do this thing. And I was like, whatever, I didn't have, like, I didn't have a plan for like my next post anyway. So I was like, that's fine, whatever. We'll just do it. And so we did it and it was by that night it was the number one video on our TikTok channel

Matt Johnson (09:25):
and they

Nick Clason (09:27):
Were like freaking out about it. They're like sending me screenshots. I'd like, Nick, this is the number one video on our to channel. And I was like, yeah, I'm an idiot. You guys are smarter

Matt Johnson (09:37):
Than me. when it comes to having yeah. When it comes to having the finger on the pulse of trends, your students are gonna be the people that know what's going on.

Nick Clason (09:46):
Yeah. Which I posted something on our Twitter the other day and there's like, you know, TikTok ideas, like short form video ideas. And one of them basically is like, ask your youth group smiley face.

Matt Johnson (09:57):
Yep.

Nick Clason (09:58):
Just go to them, like stop putting some 35 year old in charge of, of TikTok. Like go ask the 15 year olds who are spending all hours of all days on it. They will bring you the trends. They'll bring you the ideas and

Matt Johnson (10:12):
Exactly

Nick Clason (10:12):
Crap, dude. They'll probably even like do it for you if you want 'em to like

Matt Johnson (10:16):
Yeah. Which is actually one topics we talk about. Yep.

Nick Clason (10:20):
And, and that's what man, we talk about that, or that's been talked about in like the growing young study by four youth Institute, Kara Powell, all those people, they talk about this idea of key chain leadership, like give, give the, the students who have, uh, some level of authority and responsibility within their church are more inclined to stick with their faith. Mm-hmm so if you give them some sort of ownership of it, you know, but oftentimes I think we just shy away from that because they could make us look bad or they could do something that we don't know or trust, but you know, that's a, it should, church should be a safe place for them to express that and, and try things and fail and, and all those things. So.

Matt Johnson (11:05):
Yep. Exactly.

Nick Clason (11:06):
Yeah. All right. So, um, let's look at these six ideas. Um, and we're gonna talk about, we're gonna talk about six short form video trends to look out for. Uh, the first one is brand challenges. So Matt talk about what a brand challenge is for just a second, so that us, uh, layman and idiots know what that even means.

Matt Johnson (11:32):
Yeah. So a brand challenge, um, is essentially taking the viral content idea. So if you, if you're li if you're listening to this and you have no idea how TikTok works TikTok, you can actually search stuff by like dances songs and sounds, um, which is what makes it stick out from a lot of the other social media platforms. So it's not like based off of hashtags or actually trying to search, or you can search things off of filters. Like that's like the world of TikTok. So you can search actually based off of the content. So as a brand, you could create like a brand challenge sound. So let's go back to, um, a couple years ago in the ice bucket challenge. Okay. And how big that got before the world of TikTok. Now think if your brand could actually mimic the success of the ice bucket challenge on TikTok and how big that could actually get.

Matt Johnson (12:32):
Uh, so it's really taking this idea of, Hey, we're challenging you to, uh, you do something, whatever that looks like. So a great way you could do this as a church is we wanna challenge you to, uh, talk to God five times this week. Um, or, Hey, we wanna challenge you to pray twice this week. Like you can come up with some spiritual challenges that people can do, or you can come up with some church challenge or like more outreachy challenges. So like, um, we wanna challenge you to, you know, see with Jesus' eyes five times this week and help somebody on the street. Um, so it's like starting to be more cognitive, uh, to help people be more cognitive of like their day to day. Uh, another good example of this is like Colgate for mother's day. They did like this huge make mom smile challenge, which was really a challenge to just post photos of your mom or a video of your mom on TikTok.

Matt Johnson (13:34):
And it was for mother's day in Colgate, you know, make mom smile, get white teeth. I don't know, but it was really just a way to get people to post their mom and everyone's gonna post their mom. So, or you could come up with a challenge like who you're praying for this week, post a photo of who you're praying for this week or a video of who you're praying for this week or a video of who you're bringing to youth ministry this week. I'm not gonna see these challenges are gonna go viral. Like, you know, um, the ice bucket challenge, but they could go viral in your church. And that's really the, all that you need right now.

Nick Clason (14:04):
Yeah. Yeah. All right. So, wow. I got super echoy. I had to move cuz my kids came down the basement. Yeah,

Matt Johnson (14:13):
You got real echoy. Sorry.

Nick Clason (14:16):
Um, the next one it talks about, it talks about influencer ads. So mm-hmm, um, obviously we're a church. We're not trying to be influencers mm-hmm but what, like what would be something that we could do in the church with, with that idea?

Matt Johnson (14:36):
Yeah. So influencer marketing is always going to give you a higher ROI, always. Um, yeah. That's just because think about the people you trust and how you take, you know, what they say higher than others. So, good example of this in the church world is, you know, Lee Stroble is a massive influencer for the Christian community or Dave Ramsey. Um, so if you like got buy-in from them, you're probably more likely going to like purchase whatever, you know, these stro or Dave Ramsey's talking about. Um, now in your world, let's say we're at a church of, you know, let's say really small church just planted. I have 80 people at my church. You're probably not gonna be able to get a Lee Stroble to talk about your church. I mean, if you got Lee stro, talk about your church, that's a big deal.

Nick Clason (15:29):
Well, and I mean, what's that thing, that cameo thing you could do that

Matt Johnson (15:33):
You could do a cameo. Yeah. But uh, usually Lee Strobel, cuz you know, I've worked with him, his, uh, the asking price could be a little high for his ads and that's because he is Le Strobel. Yeah. Um, and he did a lot of stuff for favors for us though. Cause he is a really nice guy, but like we also like getting him just speaking, you know, it costs money. I mean he's worth it, whatever. Um, so how can you do influencer marketing in your church? Well, your pastor can be considered an influencer. Um, he, I mean, obviously he's probably the big influencer on your campus. Uh, so you start using him in a more strategic option to like promote stuff. You could also, if you really wanna get creative, find these people that you would call influencers in your church. So let's say this is gonna sound real bad, Nick, and you can push back all you want.

Matt Johnson (16:28):
Cause this is definitely like going to a weird space with your youth group. But as a youth leader, I, um, you could definitely find the popular kid yeah. And get the popular kid to, you know, start pushing stuff on like be your influencer for you. Um, yeah. Yeah. Now we don't wanna play favorites or anything like that obviously. But at the same time, if you know, like, Hey, if I got, let's say Abigail, for instance, to like get on board for this, I know she would get like 12 other people to get on board for this. That's a good use for influencer marketing. So think of influencer marketing on a small scale at your church that could grow into a bigger scale and just make that short term, uh, short form video. Like that's the key to all this. So

Nick Clason (17:13):
Yeah. I don't think like, like we've said, I don't think our goal is to become, get famous people or whatever. Right. But no, but you're right. If, if your senior pass, especially if your senior pastor is not a part of your social media channels too often, like when you post him, that's going to, that's gonna have that effect, you know? Yep. If you are the senior pastor you're listening to this and you are the primary person running things on digital and social, like then there is, you're not gonna have that same influencer or effect because you're the primary face on there. You know what I mean? Yep. So you gotta exactly. Who else are you gonna put out there? All right. The next thing we talk about is, uh, product teasers. So, um, this is talking about, you know, it says anywhere from six to 60 seconds, um, where you're teasing something that's coming. I think this one is one that works perfectly within the church. Mm-hmm you know what I mean? Yep.

Matt Johnson (18:03):
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It's like think of a traditional commercial is usually a product teaser, so

Nick Clason (18:10):
Yeah, exactly. And so one of the things we did, um, all gosh for probably like 5, 4, 4, 5 months, uh, on our TikTok was just the teaser, uh, round signing up for summer camp. So we did all kinds of stuff that was promoting the idea of summer camp, giving a sneak peek to summer camp. Um, you know, funny videos about summer camp, but it was all about some upcoming event. And that was obviously within the realm of our student ministry. Mm-hmm . And so if you're running this for a church, you have not only summer camp coming up, but you have vacation Bible school and you have the adult Bible study starting and you have financial peace university on its way, and you have the missions trip, uh, domestic and international and you, so you have a million things and that's, that's probably more, the challenge is trying to figure out what or how to promote everything, but product product teasing is something that can become very easy to do. You know what I mean? Uh, in the church world.

Matt Johnson (19:14):
So mm-hmm yep, absolutely.

Nick Clason (19:16):
So real quick, before we jump to the next one, uh, as someone who does marketing in the church, Matt, what is your like preferred model for knowing what to promote and how often, and do you have like a, do you have like a framework built? Do you have like a, a rule of thumb? That's good, good practice for that because you know, if you're in the seat, you're in the kids' ministry wants their announcement and the student ministry wants their announcement and the women's ministry wants their announcement and the seniors ministry wants their announcement who gets the announcement.

Matt Johnson (19:52):
Great question. So step one is making, um, the various ministries kind of work together and work backwards. So the rule of thumb on any given Sunday for us is three announcements. And that is just because we know three decisions is as many as people can do before they start feeling overwhelmed. So if I give you four decisions, that fourth decision is gonna take less precedent than the other three. So that's step one is get the ministries to like, not launch five things on the same weekend, which we all wanna do. I, we all wanna do it, but don't do it. It's just two the next week. It's fine. Um, secondly is, uh, yeah, we, we have built, uh, an SOP, a standard operating procedure to really define what takes precedent over everything. So, um, what gets on social media is gonna be different than what gets in our email for the week, which will be different than what's on stage, which will be different than what the pastor talks about.

Matt Johnson (20:56):
And this is all weighed depending on the, um, the outreach draw of it. So, um, social and email, we have decided that email is for internal. So if this is more of internal event, so rooted, rooted is not gonna be something that you invite friends to really that are not part of the church, cuz rooted is gonna make you go deep in small groups. That should just be our newsletter and um, probably our host spot. And why I say that for the host spot for that is because, uh, that's a great way to get people that are in the church that probably have not done rooted. And they're new to go, okay, go do this to take next step with Parkview. Um, uh, the set, the next thing. So then social like alpha is great for social media because that's an external thing. So I can run, you know, ads behind that and get people to come to that.

Matt Johnson (21:59):
And then, uh, like if it's something that's gonna really affect everyone and that's a big deal that goes to the pastor to talk about in his spot. So let's say we have like family weekend coming up our next gen weekend. That's something that should probably be talked about by the pastor when the most captive audience is there. If that's something that we have said as a church, like that's hu ways higher than everything else. So you really just gotta define who your target is for everything that you're trying to promote. And then you can kind of figure out where they fit in your puzzle piece of all the digital platforms you have. Um, what's

Nick Clason (22:36):
The, what's the biggest, like, can you think of a time, like the number one time that you had like multiple people vying for, for something like, and how did you filter through that?

Matt Johnson (22:47):
Oh, I mean, it happens all the time at where we're at now and it's because everyone thinks their stuff is super important urgent. And the big thing is just sitting down with everyone and explaining their target and actually getting their purpose. And once they start realizing, oh yeah, mine is internal. Mine's really only for preschoolers. It's like, okay, then we should target preschoolers. Like this should not be, you know, an all church thing, um, necessarily it could be depending on what the event is, but 99% of the time, it's not going to be, um, now at a smaller church and maybe you have less going on. That's okay to like talk about all this stuff with your congregation and be like, yeah, I do have a friend that has a preschooler and I've talked about God with them and they might be interested to come, but like, that's great. That's a great avenue for that. But when you have eight different type of group functionalities, plus five kids things, plus your student things, plus your, um, mission things on top of, uh, we have mass baptism weekend or whatever, like you gotta really start kinda weighing what is actually gonna get you the most bang for your, your most bang for your buck, quote, unquote,

Nick Clason (23:56):
Bang for your,

Matt Johnson (23:58):
I was saying quote with buck unquote quote.

Nick Clason (24:04):
All right, great. Those just like a quick deviation, but uh, okay. So the next thing here in this article is more user generated content. All right. So what's that. And how can churches use it?

Matt Johnson (24:18):
User generated content is literally just getting your users to create content for you. So, um,

Nick Clason (24:25):
That feels like churches could do pretty

Matt Johnson (24:28):
Easily, oh, a hundred percent. You should be doing it. And user generated content has actually been shown. I haven't seen the most recent studies, so don't quote me on this, but it was, uh, shown to be one of the highest ways for conversion rate. And that's because you're trusting someone that, you know, you so it's. So if you think about it in the hierarchy of like influencer marketing commercials and then user generated content user generated, content's gonna have the highest conversion because Nick, if you tell me about something, I'm gonna trust that more than if Lee Stroble tells me about something, which I trust Leero more than, uh, my I'm watching a Dodgers game and there's a commercial that comes on. So if you think about that

Nick Clason (25:10):
H baseball, right?

Matt Johnson (25:13):
Cause baseball is good. Nick, it's good for the heart, especially when you have a team that wins a lot. So if you think about that hierarchy, that like, okay. Yeah. It's building that trust user generated content is gonna weigh higher.

Nick Clason (25:28):
Yeah. Yeah. Uh, how, how, how, like, how could churches go about capturing user generated content?

Matt Johnson (25:38):
Um, great way is, do you have some kids you trust, well, have them run your Instagram or TikTok for the day? Um, yeah. You're at camp. Uh, have your students do be like, Hey, I want you guys to promote camp today, take the camera or the GoPro with you and you guys just go crazy. Like you have some options there there's a lot, like it CR this is where you can get whoever you want to be as creative as they possibly can within the context of whatever your, uh, your guidelines are at your church.

Nick Clason (26:09):
Yeah. Well, I'm thinking too, man, you could even do, uh, like what's it called? Like takeovers on Instagram stories. Mm-hmm, you know, um, little things like that. Give, give people like a kind of a glimpse a day in the life, all that type of stuff. Uh, I did that one year at camp where a different person took over Instagram for the day, you know, and they just, they got access to our student mystery account for the day. So, all right. Uh, sweet. The next one is more behind the brands videos. So this one's like a, this one's like a, I don't know, like kinda like a behind the scenes one, but it says mm-hmm, , uh, a sprout social study said that 70% of consumers say they feel more connected to brands who, uh, whose CEO is active on social media platform. So that goes to that senior pastor thing.

Nick Clason (27:02):
Um, but what are, what are some of the behind the scenes? Like, you know, we that's, that one feels like a super easy one for churches. Like people see what you want them to see on a Sunday morning or whatever, but where, but given them a glimpse into the office or the staff meeting or the prayer meeting, or a tour of like a, a place that normal people don't get to see those types of things, I feel like are super a, you know, have such a chance to blow up for people to just get excited about it.

Matt Johnson (27:36):
Yep. Yeah. And it's super easy. Like do walk around the office and say, Hey, here's Doreen. I want you to know about her and meet her and give your testimony or whatever. Or here's our meeting room or here's our staff meeting today, or here's our prayer time today, like build that stuff or take a photo of it and post it. And we have personally seen this be some of our, uh, highest, uh, converting slash liked and engaged stuff that we have done. And this is something we've recently just added to our world. So, um, getting, and it's so easy, Nick, it's so easy. Like you just walk up to someone with your phone and you film them for 30 seconds and then get couple hundreds on it.

Nick Clason (28:13):
Yeah. Yeah. Super easy. So, you know, you can even add that it's like a once a week, like a actually, uh, you've passed a friend of mine. He used to do this thing called, uh, what's behind that door. And it was just like a series that he would do. And he'd like explore different closets basically in the church, you know? And he had a little bumper with it and he would just do it. It was honestly, it was very TikTok esque before TikTok. He was just posting on his Instagram, like feed, but that was basically what he was doing. And then I remember one, he did like a super funny one. where he like went up into the attic and he planted this like baby doll. And so he like shown the flashlight and the attic on the baby doll. And then it just showed him like freaking out, like running away and then just standing there, like stunned at the end.

Nick Clason (29:01):
And that's how it ended like this, the perfect TikTok archetype, but he was doing it like before, before talk's time, even, you know? But I love that. Just little things like that that are just fun. What's behind that door, you know, what's that closet. Have you ever, have you ever wondered what this is? Like, there's, there's a million probably things in your church like that, and it's stupid stuff. Right? Like you hide it for the weekend, but people, people eat that stuff up, man. If they're like, this is our Christmas storage closet, for whatever reason, they're like, ah, it's amazing. Like I think because there's like a vulnerability there, they just feel like a greater sense of connection to your church. Yep. Because of that, like, oh yeah. I, I got to see where they have the Christmas trees, like who cares, but people do

Matt Johnson (29:47):
They do. And um, it's easy. like, that's all I could say. It's easy. Just do it.

Nick Clason (29:53):
Yeah. Yeah. There's really no reason not to. All right. The last one that this, uh, HubSpot article has here is more explainer or educational videos. And I feel like this is the one that the church can just go absolutely crazy on

Matt Johnson (30:06):
Mm-hmm

Nick Clason (30:07):
Mm-hmm so here's what I wanna do. I wanna do a little game. You ready? I didn't even tell you about this. Mm-hmm and it's coming to my brain right now for the very first time. Love it. So I want us to make a list and we're just gonna bounce back and forth. And the person who, uh, runs out of ideas first loses you ready?

Matt Johnson (30:25):
A list of

Nick Clason (30:26):
A list of educational or explainer videos. Okay. So like things that churches could do, um, great. And I'll start, then you go then back to me, then you, does that make sense? We're gonna ping pong it back and forth.

Matt Johnson (30:39):
Yep.

Nick Clason (30:40):
All right. So, um, you could do a, how to pray video,

Matt Johnson (30:47):
Man. That was on my mind. You could do a how to share your faith video.

Nick Clason (30:51):
Mm that's a good one. You could do how to read your Bible video.

Matt Johnson (30:55):
You could do how to share your testimony video.

Nick Clason (30:58):
that? I don't know. That seems very close to the first one. You said, uh, you

Matt Johnson (31:03):
Could do test. Well, I guess how do you share Jesus and how do you do your testimony? I guess

Nick Clason (31:10):
You could do, uh, you could explain like a deep theological truth, like the holy spirit or something like that.

Matt Johnson (31:19):
Oh yeah. That's good. Uh, one of my favorite types of videos is, uh, like dumbing down, complicated Bibles mm-hmm or, you know, so like, uh, talk about Leviticus that makes sense for people or numbers, you know?

Nick Clason (31:37):
Yeah. Yeah. That's like the Bible project. Yep. Um, you could do. Yeah. What was I gonna say? I had something, uh, uh, maybe I'm gonna lose here. Uh, you could do, uh, nah, I, I think I lost man. You win. Congratulations. Um, thanks. Yeah, but you see, like we could have gone a lot longer, but I'm an idiot. Oh,

Matt Johnson (32:01):
Definitely. Well, you had it. It's it's early, everybody.

Nick Clason (32:05):
That's so early. And this is my fourth room that I'm in now. Cuz I, my kids took the only room that didn't echo and now I'm sitting in a bedroom closet. That's just like the echoes of all the echoes. But I was thinking you could, yeah, you could do Bible content. Oh, this is what I was gonna say. You could do, like you could share, uh, unknown stories of the Bible you could share. I love that. Um, you know, like the weird, like the Balo and the Baylor story, or you could share like the, the name and diving in the, in the Jordan river, like you could just, you could pull some of the, the silly verses out, you know, and explain them. You could, there's just, there's a million different ways you could do overviews of, of new Testament, old Testament who wrote the book, why that's important, how to do hermeneutics, how do homo Lytics, like, there's just, there's things that at any given time, you, if you're a pastor, like, you know, is important, but you have to leave those things like on the chopping room floor yeah.

Nick Clason (33:06):
Of your sermon. And like you can pull some of those things out. You could even do like a deeper dive from your sermon of something that you did study in your research, but you chose not to include it for time sake or for whatever purpose, but you could just say, Hey, Hey, here's something that I, I researched last week in light of the sermon on acts chapter two and boom, you got a 62nd video explaining that. And those types of things I see on TikTok all day long. Not, not necessarily like spiritually though. I do see some of those, but I just mean like in general, those like quick hitter, 62nd, you know, explainer videos. And I think that this is what, this is what probably most churches probably are gonna lean towards. Um, at least naturally cuz that's we're in the content creation business, you know?

Matt Johnson (33:55):
Yep.

Nick Clason (33:56):
So there it is guys. Uh, like I said, I will, um, I will post a link to this article in the show notes, feel free to check it out hybrid ministry.xyz. Um, or however else you, uh, do it, Matt, I have a question for you

Matt Johnson (34:12):
Ask, go away.

Nick Clason (34:13):
It's talking about down here later on in this article, best platforms for short form video, it's got TikTok number one, Instagram reels, number two. YouTube shorts. Number three. Yeah. Do, are we messing with YouTube shorts these days?

Matt Johnson (34:28):
Um, uh, uh, depends on the day. You know, YouTube is actually out is weighing long form content higher again, so, okay. Um, if you can create some YouTube shorts, that's great. If someone gets stuck in the YouTube shorts, that's usually a good thing. The big thing about shorts is, uh, they need to create a shorts app. If they create a shorts app, I think you would probably have more success there. Um, right now it's hidden in the YouTube app. Um, I think it's only a matter of time before they do make a shorts app. Uh,

Nick Clason (35:05):
So maybe when they do that, it's time to time to make that matter a little more.

Matt Johnson (35:09):
Yeah. And I'm was gonna say, when it comes to Google, I really don't buy into their stuff quickly cuz the second it doesn't do what they want to do. They just kill it. So , I mean there's a whole website dedicated to like projects killed by Google. You can literally look it up. Um, and I'm telling you like it's literally called killed by google.com and you would just be mind blown by the amount of stuff they test before they kill it. So YouTube shorts is there for now, but I mean, YouTube go was a thing at one point and YouTube originals was a thing. Remember Google

Nick Clason (35:44):
Plus,

Matt Johnson (35:45):
Remember Google plus plus. Yeah like there's a lot there. So I would, if shorts does not become its own app, I, I would say it's probably gonna get killed sooner or later.

Nick Clason (35:55):
There's a lot of stuff on this website, bro.

Matt Johnson (35:57):
I told you, man. It, well,

Nick Clason (35:59):
We'll throw it in the notes too. Yeah. Um,

Matt Johnson (36:02):
It's just a fun website.

Nick Clason (36:04):
Yeah, it is fun. And then there's uh, there's some other apps that this HubSpot article is referencing like some trier hippo Magisto lately.ai and whiskey. Are any of those worth churches investing any their time in at this point, would you say

Matt Johnson (36:22):
It depends on your margin? So like trier is very song based, even more song based for, um, the TikTok. So if you have like a awesome worship band and you're not in trier, like maybe you should look into it. Um, and then the other stuff that's on you like hippo, Mao, um, lately a lot of this stuff is more of, uh, how to leverage short form content more rather than a platform that you would host short form content on. So like HIPAA video might be a good resource for you to look into if you wanna really maximize your like CTAs and your, um, auto like automation for video and conversion and stuff. So, um, but for hosting stuff like YouTube reels and TikTok, uh, TikTok are gonna be number one. And the, like I said, you look into it, but it's just like be real that's out right now. There's these, these smaller social platforms that are like captivating their audiences, but I nothing has blown up like TikTok since literally Instagram and Instagram took a long time to blow up. I don't think people remember that.

Nick Clason (37:30):
Yeah. Yeah. All right. Sweet. Well, I just saw those and I was like, Hey, these are like literally trier hippo Magista lately in w never even heard of any of those. So this is where

Matt Johnson (37:41):
This is. They're more of a tool podcast.

Nick Clason (37:43):
Tell us these things. So,

Matt Johnson (37:45):
Yep, absolutely.

Nick Clason (37:46):
All right, man. Well that is it for today. Appreciate, appreciate your talking. Appreciate you watching me go from room to room, room, room to room to find spot to record, uh, but excited to continue to be on this journey with y'all feel free to subscribe. Give us a rating. We'd love to hear from you at hybridministry.xyz and we'll talk soon.