#67 - Using Social to Maximize Your Reach - Chris Martin with Moody Publishers

Ministry At Scale

Chris Martin is the content marketing editor at Moody Publishers. From his talk at the 2022 Digital Ministry Conference, Chris shares some practical tips for maximizing your reach using social media.

Just a few years ago, it wasn’t uncommon to reach a high percentage of your followers on social media with just a single post. Reaching 50% of your followers was not unheard of. Today, however, the average organic Facebook post reaches about 5% of followers. The best way to use Meta is to free yourself from Meta. If we learn to use social media as a means to an end, it will have less of a hold on how we reach our audiences. One practical way to do this is to focus on driving your audience to email lists or other forms of intimate off-social media communication. If social media is the front porch of our ministry or nonprofit, we need to invite users through the front porch into the living room; a more inviting place where we can engage more effectively.

When creating content for social, we also need to also consider the fact that going viral is not always as great as it seems.

“Can you help us go viral?” That’s one of the most common questions that social media managers get. According to Chris, it’s not as great as it sounds. It seems like the most common way to go viral today is to do something that makes a lot of people mad. In many cases, going viral could lead to controversy in a way that you did not intent. Rather than focusing on trying to go viral, the best way to use social media to maximize your reach is to just make good content. In order to do this, Chris outlines three steps:

Isolate your audience. Investigate their needs.

Identify the gifts God has given you to steward for the good of his kingdom.

To learn more about how to take practical steps in order to isolate, investigate and identify, listen to the entirety of episode #67 of the ministry at scale podcast.

Resources:

Terms of service book