For the past year, I’ve been on a personal tear about the church and social media.

For the gist of it, here’s a video about one of the biggest mistakes I see churches make.

The TLDR is that many pastors and other leaders in normal-size churches don’t understand how the algorithm drives Facebook, to really get traction, you have to pay to play, and the realization that many churches' posting strategies are actually HURTING their ability to reach people on Social Media.

What’s the biggest answer?

Guerrilla Marketing.

You have to game the algorithm. And you don’t do it with complicated back-end work.

You do it by enlisting a handful of people in your church to be willing to engage. You create posts that invite engagement. Any engagement is signaling to Meta (which owns both Facebook and Instagram) that people are willing and want to engage in your content.

So, a couple of tips about how to take advantage of this strategy.

First - the algorithm doesn’t like announcements. What you have to do is find a way to tell the story without making it an ad. A graphic or flyer, with a description only inviting people to come to something, automatically dives the algorithm. When this happens, it affects any and all posts afterwards.

Instead, share a great picture of someone for whom the event is aimed, or who has attended in the past.

Give a quote of why they love it, and tell a compelling story about how this changes lives. Make the last sentence a brief explanation of when, where, and how. Aim to only have 25% of your posts be this announcement template. Make sure the other posts are focused on creating content people will want to engage with. Ask questions, tell stories, share scripture, and other posts that automatically make someone want to comment.

Now that’s out of the way, more about this guerrilla marketing strategy.

Find 5-10 people in your church who seem to ALWAYS be on the social platform. Ask them specifically to help the church account by engaging on content. Ask them to “like” every post at least. If the post asks a question, or is engaging a response, ask them to make sure to comment. If something is appropriate, ask them to share the post. Enlisting this team will help the algorithm see consistent engagement. The post gets dripped out to more accounts, especially the shared followers all of your guerrilla team has. That causes local virality.

Have a good strategy for your church's social media accounts.

Chad