Discover practical strategies and the latest trends for revitalizing your church’s social media presence in the new year with insights from Ryan Dunn on MyCom: Church Communications and Marketing.
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In this episode
Looking to revitalize your church’s digital presence for the new year? In this episode of MyCom, host Ryan Dunn shares practical strategies and insider insights to help you grow your ministry and foster authentic connections online. Whether you’re just starting out or aiming to level up your church’s social media, you’ll learn actionable tips for Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube—with special focus on creating engaging content, leveraging platform algorithms, and tailoring your message for specific audiences.
Discover how to:
- Build a welcoming and knowable digital church identity
- Turn your congregation into brand ambassadors for greater online reach
- Create share-worthy content that gets noticed in algorithm-driven feeds
- Use stories, reels, and long-form videos to deepen engagement
- Optimize your church’s video and search strategy for lasting impact
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Episode transcript
Ryan Dunn:
Ready to start the new year with a fresh social media presence? We're exploring strategies for refreshing and growing your church's connections through social media on this episode of MYCOM.
Ryan Dunn:
This is the MYCOM Church Communications and Marketing podcast. We're building your digital ministry toolkit and helping to bring your congregation into the digital age. Have you ever thought about a theological education but you weren't really sure about who to talk to about it? Well, Garrett Seminary is forming Laity Discernment Cohorts to support people in discerning their vocation and how to embrace it. Take your first class for just $200 tuition. Learn more at Garrett.edu Discernment. My name is Ryan Dunn. I am a fellow traveler on the journey to better church communications.
Ryan Dunn:
And whether you're considering starting a new social media profile for your ministry, or if you're just wanting to pick up some tips for freshening up your church's digital presence, then this might be the most important podcast you listen to all year. I'm just kidding. Kind of not to say that this isn't an important episode, but I've just been struck by the number of podcast episodes and training videos that make that kind of claim. And then the other thing that they tend to say is, you're definitely going to want to listen all the way through to the end, because I'll offer four quick tips for leveling up your social media presence in the new year, which you know is true in this case as well. We're going to be talking about trends that we're following, and I have one last cliched trendy blurb to offer you, and that's if conversations like this are valuable to you, then make sure to hit the subscribe or Follow button on your podcast listening platform. It would also be a big help to us if you left a rating or review, or if you made a comment about what you appreciate about this particular episode. Apps like Spotify and YouTube allow for comments, and it lets us know what kind of content is meaningful for your communications ministry. All right, all that aside, I I guess.
Ryan Dunn:
Well, this stuff sounds a little funny because my background isn't primarily in marketing and communications. I have a background in local church ministry, mostly with youth and young adults. Early in my career life, I worked in digital content development and broadcasting and online marketing. But I'm guessing a good number of us are approaching our digital ministries with backgrounds more related to parish ministry than to online marketing. And initially I was hired by United Methodist Communications to be an online pastoral presence, and then I had to learn the ins and outs of social media, really, through daily immersion. And that's what I can bring into this podcast space today. So I may not have all the lingo and quick facts of those who have an education and background in digital communications, but I do have the perspective of a person in ministry who's been heavily engaged in social media for the past decade, and that makes me feel really old. So, well, let's move on.
Ryan Dunn:
I'm going to kind of set the table for this podcast episode in looking at the practices that I've been exploring as a social media manager for the United Methodist Church's social media profiles. Our overall goal for the United Methodist Church's social media is to create brand awareness and constituent alignment. Now that sounds like buzzwordy type stuff. So let me put it this way. We will use social media platforms to let people know who the United Methodist Church is and what the United Methodist Church cares about. And this overall strategy came about through observations made through watching the online growth of some local churches. And while a big part of my job is social media management, I also kind of get to be a lurker or an Internet troll for Jesus. Now, I don't go around stirring up the pot or trying to start arguments, but instead I'm just kind of lurking around the digital realm looking for topics and conversations that excite people.
Ryan Dunn:
And I want to see what churches are doing in those spaces that create a sense of connection. And what I've noticed is that churches who exhibit growth in the post-2020 culture are very easy to get to know through their digital presence. And part of the ease of knowability is that they tend to bring their presence into the online spaces in which they inhabit. And that's a very Methodist ideal, this idea of moving towards people and meeting them where they are, as opposed to calling them into a particular space in order then to have them learn about what the faith community is all about. Right now I'm looking at a local church in Nashville, Tennessee, Glendale United Methodist Church. And they have more than doubled over the past eight years in terms of participation. And I think a big part of their ability to invite people in has been their social media presence. And you can get a pretty good sense of who Glendale United Methodist Church is by looking at their profiles on social media.
Ryan Dunn:
You can certainly infer that topics around justice and inclusion are important to them. You can see that they're multi-generational, I guess, that they have lots of shared meals. I see lots of pictures of that. What I don't see a lot of in looking at their profiles are announcement slides or stock images. Incidentally, a couple of the posts there are announcements, but they're doing something very clever here. They're working with the will of the all-powerful algorithm to get their announcements and invitations to the people. And this is something really important to note. We need to remember this golden rule.
Ryan Dunn:
Social media platforms do not exist for us to share our information or our feelings or our views or priorities. They actually exist to keep people engaged on their platforms. And so we just need to be mindful of the platform's goals and not just our own goals. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, they're all about attention. And that algorithm then rewards content that keeps people scrolling, swiping, watching or engaging. Now, if we want our content to be seen, we need to create things that serve the platform's goals. Unfortunately. And that's what Glendale UMC does really well.
Ryan Dunn:
They're doing some broadcast style posting that kind of casts out the information, but they're doing it with the algorithm's goals in mind. They're using lots of pictures of their people doing the things that their church does. Oh, and it's also cool to note that Glendale does not have a staff person for their social media. It's volunteer driven. So in the interest of sharing the UMC's messaging of open hearts, open minds, open doors, I've borrowed some of these ideals. We want to make it easy for the user to discover who is in the United Methodist Church and then what the United Methodist Church cares about. For the United Methodist Church, we're going to treat our presence on our different social media platforms as part of a whole. So that means that each platform has a semi-unique audience in mind and each of these audiences comprises the whole of the UMC online.
Ryan Dunn:
We're not assuming that we're reaching all the people through each individual platform. And that means that we tailor content to communicate specifically to that audience on that platform. Now, if you're just starting out, this sounds like a lot, or even if you're doing a reboot on your church's social media. So you may just want to start on one platform and the best suggestion is to start where most of your people already are. Now, in most congregations, that's going to be Facebook of global usage of social media, around 60% of the users are on Facebook. But maybe you have a really young congregation or ministry group and most of your people are on say, TikTok. The important thing is to pay attention to where you're most likely to grab ahold of what we would call brand ambassadors. These are the people who are going to interact with and share your content where they are.
Ryan Dunn:
That's where you would also want to be. I'm going to talk specifically about Facebook and Instagram, TikTok and a little bit about YouTube, but we'll start with Facebook because it's the biggest one in the room. Right. Our goal for the UMC Facebook page is to empower brand advocates and get more UMC members interacting with and sharing content. And I realize that again, brand advocates is a very market industry phrase. It's kind of buzzy. I, I think it's a kind of shortcut term really, for people who are going to be our top fans or our most engaged users. Our primary audience for the UMC Facebook page are current UMC members.
Ryan Dunn:
Now, there's a rationale in targeting content towards current members instead of, say, prospective members. And again, it has to do with that algorithm. Now, once upon a time, institutional brands, including the UMC, ruled Facebook's feed. Basically, the bigger your following was, the more exposure you garnered on the platform. That's no longer the case in 2018, and I know this is a while back, but some people are still operating with the former circumstances in mind. In 2018, Mark Zuckerberg made some big announcements about Meta changing their algorithm in order to prioritize person to person interaction. And they really followed through with that. Actually, you are much more likely to see a piece of content from, say, your old high school buddy than you are to see a piece of content from the United Methodist Church.
Ryan Dunn:
Size of following doesn't matter nearly as much. What Facebook really figured out was that when we're talking from peer to peer, we're more likely to stay engaged on the platform than when we're seeing tons of posts from pages with mega followings. For our institutional pages, like our church pages, this means that we can't really count on Facebook sharing content for us. We were just not a high priority for them. Unless, of course, you want to pay Facebook to make sure that your content gets in front of people through boosted posts and ads. But we're going to assume that you're working with a pretty limited budget. You know, like the average church social media budget is about $5. So we're going to assume that you're working with something like that.
Ryan Dunn:
And that means that if we want our content to reach beyond our community, we have to provide content that our current community, our current audience wants to share to their friends. And this means that I've begun focusing on some new Key Metrics for our Facebook Content I want to see Content Gaining shares Shares are my favorite right now. We can be lured to concentrate on bigger numbers like reach and engagements or what they've balled into interactions. But but I've noticed that if the shares are high on a post, then the rest of those numbers are going to be high too. To me, shares really indicate that we've provided a piece of content that a member feels so valuable that they want to share it with their friends. And if they're sharing it, then we as a church become easily knowable. Because of course, if someone wants to know what United Methodists are like, they can easily see their friends who are sharing this content for our channel. A few things that I've noticed are that prayers get shares he needs a little rhyme, right? Invite your people to pray a couple times a week and don't be shy about providing topics and words for prayer.
Ryan Dunn:
Our local UMCs and agencies responding to world situations or conflicts and tragedies. That kind of content is highly shareable, though I'd prefer not to have a lot of that kind of content necessarily available. Helpful quotes, spiritual practices, and article links are also able to inspire some sharing. Moving on to Instagram there's quite a bit of overlap in our audience from Facebook to Instagram. We're still primarily targeting members, but we found that Instagram members tend to be younger and with less background in the UMC than our Facebook members. So that means the content that takes off on that platform looks a little bit different. I've found that people really respond to answers to questions about the UMC. I hate to say it, but on Facebook people just want to debate the merits of these answers more and more, while the Instagram audience expresses more appreciation for the perspective.
Ryan Dunn:
Usually whenever we post a video about United Methodist beliefs, several people ask for more of that specific kind of content. For us, that often is presented through a reel, a short form video, and a couple things I've noticed about reels. First, talking people garner more attention than text over moving background, even if that talking person is just a static talking headshot, like what I might look like in the video form of this podcast. It just seems that the algorithm or our human minds are both put together. We prefer the personal feel of having a person speak to us, and a personal address is most preferred. So it's pretty easy for any of us to rip a clip from a sermon and that kind of works well. But what actually seems to work even better is having a pastor or ministry leader address the camera directly and deliver a quick spiritual thought or contemplative question.
Ryan Dunn:
That's reels Another cool thing to utilize on Instagram are stories. They're very useful. They're not going to grow your follower count because Instagram does not distribute stories to people who are not already followers of your page. But stories are fantastic for deepening engagement with your existing audience. Here's the catch though. You don't just want to repost your feed on an Instagram story, so don't take a normal post and then just share it to your story. We want to create unique content tailored to stories. A few pro tips since we're in the buzzworthy stuff.
Ryan Dunn:
Use interactive features like the poll sticker or quiz sticker or fill in the blank. You want to avoid overusing the link sticker because remember, algorithms reward content. They keep people engaged on that platform. A link represents them leaving, which they don't want. So what you might want to try is something like this. When you want to say, send somebody to a signup form or have them click over to a landing page, invite them to send you a direct message with a keyword, and then you can reply with a link or more information. And you can actually automate a response like that through Meta Business Suite. Especially if you have a unique keyword like say, I don't know, youth group.
Ryan Dunn:
Lock in is your keyword. Well, it'll recognize that and then you can send parents back that signup form. This trick keeps people on the platform longer, which of course Instagram loves. It allows you to provide some real time value. Also, when looking at stories, we want to keep in mind that 85% of Instagram users watch videos with the sound off again, 85%. So don't stress about voiceovers. Instead, make sure your videos and stories have text on screen in the form of captions is preferable. But with stories you can also get away with putting a lot of written text on screen.
Ryan Dunn:
In fact, this can actually work in your favor because if a user has to hold their finger down to keep the story from clicking over to the next one in order to prolong their reading time, well, that signals engagement to Instagram. It signals engagement to the algorithm. So that is a win-win. Some other content ideas that you can employ with using stories is to do a trivia or quiz question like how many miles did John Wesley travel by horseback? Or you can do a quick poll like what's the best potluck dessert? Banana pudding, apple pie or pineapple upside down cake? I've seen that some creators will add another option in addition to that that allows people to see the results in a poll without actually offering an answer. Which actually is fine for our purposes. Generally if we're not actually trying to do something scientific, but we're just seeking engagement. Also, Countdown reminders work well in stories, so you can say like registration for the Youth Lock-in ends tomorrow. And stories are really useful for those kinds of timely updates because they disappear after 24 hours.
Ryan Dunn:
So noting that registration is going to close on the Youth Lock in soon, or that the church rummage sale is just two days away, Stories is a good spot to drop those quick updates. You just might want to consider not overdoing it on stories. Posting 10 stories in a row can feel overwhelming. I recommend sticking to maybe one to two at a time, or at most three to five if you're spacing them out. I've noticed that in my own behavior, if an account has like 10 stories posted at a time, I skip over the whole page. I guess I internally feel like they're just being spammy or or greedy. It's too much, I don't like it and I'm skipping it now. Our measures of success are different on Instagram, of course.
Ryan Dunn:
Instagram is not conducive to link clicks at all, so we can kind of throw those out as a viable measurement there. Shares are still pretty useful though, for our purposes. What I really like to see though, is an increase in profile visits. To me that that indicates a curiosity about the UMC and a willingness to learn something more. So that means then that we should have some appropriate ways for people visiting our Instagram profiles to take a next step from there. In the simplest form, that would be to make sure that our website link is up to date in the profile. I've started using a third party link system. Linktree is a pretty popular example of that.
Ryan Dunn:
I've been using Link Bio or LNK Bio, which I learned from Beverly, who does the General Board of Global Mission social media. Each one of the pictures that it displays on Link in Bio is actually a link to the website that I tell it to go to. They're all clickable, taking the user to the corresponding page. And then of course those pictures that are available on the Link Bio correspond to an Instagram post. Okay, shall we talk about TikTok? I won't spend too much time here because, well, currently TikTok is in kind of a gray area. Like officially I believe it's banned in the U.S. however, it's just that the branches of government haven't enforced that ban. And because of the in and out nature of the platform, our strategy has just been a little underdeveloped.
Ryan Dunn:
But we have dabbled and found the platform useful for connecting with younger members, which is our target audience for the TikTok platform. One thing to note with TikTok is that a large number of young people use it as a search engine, so when they want to research something or find a how to on a particular topic, they search TikTok. And not surprisingly, our most watched videos on TikTok are answering questions about United Methodist beliefs. Umcom or United Methodist Communications did a YouTube series a number of years ago where United Methodist leaders answered questions from a United Methodist perspective. Topics included questions like what do United Methodists believe about the Bible? Or what do we mean by open table? Or what do we believe about hell? Well, I took these videos and I converted them to TikTok videos and they remain our most popular videos. They're over two years old now, but they're still gaining new views, which is uncommon in the social media world, right? Generally we post something for a usefulness of really about seven days and and then it just kind of disappears from our attention in the feeds. The fact that these particular videos are still garnering new views several years after they've been, I guess, produced or posted suggests that the power of TikTok is in being a search engine. Tick Tock has power as a search engine.
Ryan Dunn:
Therefore, I would suggest if you're going to jump on TikTok, you may consider posting answers to theological questions or answering questions about what your particular church believes or practices. If your church is an open and affirming church or a reconciling congregation, a great move on TikTok would be to share what that means for you, or share about what it means for your church to participate in the local farmers market or to host a spring rummage sale. One church that consistently does this kind of content well is First United Methodist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. And one thing that looking at their profile suggests is that cover images are not all that important. Really, the only usefulness in a cover image is when someone is scrolling through your profile. So one thing that I picked up in preparing for this was that I'm probably dedicating too much time and energy to crafting cover images. More important are relevant video descriptions and the use of searchable hashtags. So keep that in mind in creating your TikTok.
Ryan Dunn:
Pl Tik Tok Content Tik Tok is a platform where Hashtags are still somewhat relevant. Here's the thing with Tik Tok, though. I've noticed it is incredibly difficult for institutionally branded accounts to get much traction, but personal accounts tend to get more shareability. We can look at somebody like Reverend Jeremy Steele. He's a pastor in the D.C. area who's leveraged answering questions on TikTok into a full time appointment. Of course, his numbers are pretty large because he's spending a great deal of time cultivating an audience and he's learned well how to work in TikTok. But here's what I've noticed.
Ryan Dunn:
I have a rarely used personal TikTok page. It's months between posts for me on my TikTok profile, but each one of those that I do post outperforms a majority of our UMC page posts. And I have a couple theories around this. One is that TikTok is wary of institutions and companies using resources to take over the feed, so they guard against it. We're a business account and I think that that limits it a little bit. And well, with that, I noticed a stark dip in our viewership on the UMC channel about two months after we stopped spending money on TikTok, meaning that they could be holding out for the money again before they show our content to people. I've seen that TikTok kind of works in tiers. When you first get on, you're in the 100 level, meaning each video is going to get about 100 views.
Ryan Dunn:
When we finally hit on something, when we had something go a little bit viral for us, or when we start showing some consistency, well, we got sent to the 300 level. So each video got at least 300 video views. For a short time, our UMC page was at the 900 level. But then when they noticed that we stopped spending promotion money, we dropped back down to the 100 level. If you scroll through Jeremy Steele's profile, we'd see his base is about 3,000. So each video gets at least 3,000 views, though most exceed that quite well. All of this goes to say, if you're personally interested in cultivating a TikTok presence, you might just be better served by utilizing a personal account over an institutionally branded business account. Your messages of grace will likely reach more people that way.
Ryan Dunn:
All right, finally, let's spend a little bit of time on YouTube. Like TikTok, YouTube is often used as a search engine. In fact, it's the second most utilized search engine behind Google. You got it. Which is YouTube's parent company. Which means that searchability on YouTube equates to a degree of searchability on Google. Google has a tendency to return YouTube videos as part of its searches. And because of this searchable access, YouTube is a great platform for engaging people outside of your church or ministry.
Ryan Dunn:
It's a lot more discoverable, so to speak. Our United Methodist communication strategy for the UMC, YouTube, it's still very much in process. So for years we've been using YouTube really as just a library or depository for videos that we've produced. We haven't been intentional about cultivating a community or audience on the platform, but developing a sense of intentionality there would really help us to connect with spiritual seekers or those who are kind of at the margins of the faith community. So with Facebook and Instagram, we were focusing on current members on YouTube. We may want to be a lot more intentional about organizing our channel in a way to be accessible to those outside of our faith community and even produce some content with them in mind. Much like TikTok, YouTube is a place where content has a long lifespan. So you'll see the fruit of the efforts of producing a video last for several years.
Ryan Dunn:
Whereas again, your video content on Facebook and Instagram doesn't have much exposure after a couple weeks. I've noticed that unlike TikTok, though, cover images and video titles are very important on YouTube. And that's because of the way videos display in searches. That cover image needs to be exciting or enticing and informative. It's not uncommon for YouTube creators to actually change their video titles and cover images after a video has been released, especially if they think that the video is underperforming. We can look at Brandon Roberts Brandon Robbins YouTube page for some good examples of this. Brandon is a United Methodist pastor who does YouTube part time. A lot of his videos get hundreds of thousands of views, but of course he has definitely figured out how to produce content that is relevant to the platform.
Ryan Dunn:
Part of this is that he has the YouTube audience foremost in his mind when he is developing the content. Our practice at umcom and a practice at a lot of our churches is to produce this video content for a different audience and then we just share it on YouTube. And that's not an indictment for most of us. This is just the reality of the resources that we have available. We don't have hours to spend making platform specific videos. We'll just have to accept that our streamed worship services and our sermon recordings are unlikely to hit huge audiences. You know, the audiences in the hundreds of thousands. But if you have a passion to reach people through YouTube, it takes a YouTube centric approach.
Ryan Dunn:
So those are our UMC social media strategies as of the end of 2025. As we enter the next year, there are a few developing trends in social media that will inform our strategies moving forward. These are the four quick tips that I promised if you listened all the way to the end of the episode. First, a lot more people are utilizing social media platforms as search engines. I talked about this specifically within YouTube and TikTok, but I believe it pays to consider how content on each platform serves to meet user searches. So what searches might you be able to provide valuable responses to with your social media content? My tip is to keep search in mind when crafting post descriptions and developing content. Secondly, long form video is making a comeback. I don't know if that's good news or bad news, but for a while all we heard about was short form video.
Ryan Dunn:
The way forward was going to be short form video. And in a way we've become fatigued now by the volume of short form video. And as people crave deeper connection, they're gravitating now back towards long form video. And I think that's the key in a couple trends here. People are seeking connection, not just quick hits. So the invitation might be for us to consider how we can utilize long form video. So a video of 10 minutes or more to discuss a topic of substance and one thing I might play with would be to record a sermon as a like a sit down, chatty talking head video. So maybe the pastor in her study talking through the Sunday sermon.
Ryan Dunn:
I don't think such a change would mean all of our videos go viral per se, but I hunch that total views would increase. There's still a place for short form videos. TikTok is not going to go away from that. You can't put an 18 minute video on TikTok. But there is value to sharing a longer video as a way of building connection. Especially I believe on YouTube and Facebook. And following this trend, I believe the third tactic to consider in the new year is seeking out quality over quantity. The overall trend right now is that people are actually cutting back on overall social media usage.
Ryan Dunn:
Again, we're fatigued. This fatigue is in part driven by the sheer mass of content that's available to us. So it will pay for us to make sure that our content, the stuff that we produce, make sure it counts, make sure that it's worth the user's time. And then my last tip is to make content for an audience of one, we want to build connection. A means for establishing that connection is making the user feel like we're speaking directly to them. So instead of thinking about how we're going to create something that's going to reach hundreds of people, we're actually going to make more of an impact by thinking about what content we can provide that's going to be really valuable to the one user. And with that, be personable, be conversational, think about how your language addresses the individual instead of the group. And yeah, take it into the New Year now.
Ryan Dunn:
I hope that all this prepares you to have a super happy, super fruitful New year. For more resources for your church's communications journey, you can find them at resourceumc.org/mycom and again, if you've ever wondered if theological education was for you but you weren't sure who to talk to about it, well, then know that Garrett Seminary is forming Laity Discernment Cohorts to support people in discerning their vocation and how to embrace it. You'll meet monthly with 20 students to explore resources, dream of how you can be in ministry, and dip your toe into the water of theological education. Take your first class for just $200. Learn more at Garrett. Edu Discern. Garrett has been part of my theological education journey. I had great class experiences there and it's a lovely setting.
Ryan Dunn:
So again, Garrett Edu Discern mycom is a production of United Methodist Communications, comes out monthly. Thank you to Renee McNeil, Patty Delibovi, and Andrew Schleicher for production and marketing support. My name is Ryan Dunn and I'll talk to you again in a month. Peace.