 Alright, so welcome everyone to BC 314, our course on media and technology. Let's take a moment to pray and then we will get started. Could somebody please pray for the class? It'll start. Go ahead, somebody. Shall I pray for the class? Yeah, please go ahead. Father God Almighty, we are thankful to you, Father, for everything that you provide us, Father. This morning, as we come into your presence once again, Father, to learn about things that are important for us, Father, that would help us and enrich us, Father, so that we can reach out to multitudes more than we can think or imagine, Father, that you can accomplish much more than, Father, through media, through technology, and, Father, that we can glorify your name through everything that you have given in terms of wisdom and understanding and knowledge, Father. That's what our heart is, Father, that we would learn and give you glory and praise through what we are learning and use it to reach out to millions and millions of people through this technology, Father. As we are learning, give us the wisdom, the understanding, the zeal to learn and to use it and apply it. And, Father, we bless in it, Father. We thank you for Pastor and we thank you for all the students who are part of this group, Father, and those who will be learning and hearing it. In Jesus' name we ask and pray. Amen. Amen. Thank you. All right, so last week we had only one lecture. We spoke a little about, you know, how we, some guidance on videos and graphics that we use. And so I put it out on the PDF. Don't worry if you don't remember everything that is there. That's, so you have the PDF. So whenever you need it or whenever somebody in your, you know, ministry or church needs it, you know, you can always share the PDF with them and say, hey, here are some useful tips. And of course things keep changing, you know, keep things keep changing. So it's always important to stay, stay current with trends and how people are doing things. So today we'll talk a little bit about social media and if we have time we could get started with digital equipment as well. I just want to kind of run through some, you know, some things on the digital equipment side just to make us be aware and familiar. So I'm going to go ahead and share the PDF that we have. Yeah. So I want to talk about today we'll talk about social media. And of course there are so many different platforms and some, some of these, some platforms, they come and go, meaning they are there for a period of time and then they disappear. That used to happen. But now we are more or less kind of steady with some major platforms like we have Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and then there are others who use a couple other platforms as well. And so the, when you're thinking about using social media, a simple question to ask is, hey, the people that you're planning to reach and engage with, now where are they? What are the platforms they are using? Now, it is highly likely that these four major platforms, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram would be platforms where people that you're reaching out to are already there. It's highly likely. Now, some of them may be using, you may connect through on other platforms, but, but, you know, these four are the most common ones. You'll find a lot of people there. So just to get an idea, okay, and then you can decide, you know, okay, as a church or as a ministry or we are going to be leveraging these social media platforms. We'll use them. Of course, you know, I haven't added YouTube or those video channels. We covered them a little bit in a bunch of my videos, but you know, you may want to use YouTube as another platform to share your information. Now, once you recognize that, you know, or decide that, you know, you're going to be engaging people on these platforms, here are some tips. And these are all general tips that we need to keep in mind as we put out content on social media from, of course, we're talking from a church and a ministry perspective. One is, of course, make sure you do regular posts. If we do, you know, one a post once a month or, you know, once in two months or some, you know, with long gaps, it's not very engaging to people. They are not likely going to be looking forward to your next post, whatever you're doing. But if it's at a good frequency, a good regular interval, which, you know, in the social media world, it is at least once a week. What would be better is a few times a week, depending on the platform you're using, that will keep people connected and engaged. So the regular posts is important. Now, doing regular posts is not easy. It's not easy. For instance, I myself, I don't post. I don't have time for it. And so I personally cannot, you know, I don't make the time to do it. Now, some people, some may make the time to do it and they may just, you know, they keep on posting what was happening in their life on their own Instagram account or whatever they post. Some people find it okay to do it. For me, I don't. I just don't have the time. So I just have to depend on the people in the team to do it. But there is content available that's coming out every week, which we can post. I'm speaking from a church and a ministry perspective. And, you know, of course, as individuals, you know, you can do as often as you want. But so as a church, we do have our sermons, you know, every Sunday, there's a sermon that's being preached. So at least that can go out. And then we do some other things like we do a five minute summary of the sermon is a video summary. There's a video and audio summary. So there may be people who may just want a quick review of the sermon. They may not want to watch the entire or listen to the entire sermon. So for them, this five minute piece is attractive. Then, then, you know, we have the shots which are 60 second or less, you know, less than a minute. That's attractive. Some people are just one pot from the entire sermon that's highlighted. So that's, you know, that's a useful thing. So, you know, you can actually get three posts out of one sermon. You can do the full sermon, you can do the five minute, you can do a highlight, you know, so you've got at least three posts that can happen. Other things you can do, you can announce the upcoming Sunday sermon, especially if it's on a topic that is very interesting to your audience. If you announce it, it may get them to either come to the service or get them to connect online or, you know, or at least go to the sermon the following week after it's been delivered. So announcing an upcoming sermon could be a post. Of course, when there are events that are happening, you can announce them, testimonies, pictures and videos of things that are actually happening in the community, church services, individual experiences, things like that. So that that's again gets a lot of attention because people like to say, Hey, there's what's going on in our community or in that community. Highlights of special events and so on. So if you can decide, okay, these are the things I'm going to kind of things, we're going to post. You will, you will realize that you can actually do regular frequent posts on social media. Now, there is a lot more that can be done, of course, and there are churches who do an exceptionally good job with their social media posts. They give people a beautiful, a wonderful experience of, you know, what's happening in the service, what's happening in the community, you know, and sometimes the pastors or the leaders, they will post things from their own personal lives, which gets a lot of attention. Now, somehow I can't do that. So I don't do it. And so there's not much, there's almost zero personal thing out there. But you know, some pastors and some preachers can do that. And but that that gets a lot of attention because people like to know, Hey, what's happening in their lives? You know, where are they? What are they doing? What are they eating? Things like that. So all kinds of posts. So I'm just giving a generic list. These are things which any church or ministry can actually post. Plus, in addition to this, there could be other things. Now, the reason for regular posts is to keep people engaged. Right. So they know that they will look forward to is anything new. If they don't find regular posts, then they just kind of fade away. They stop coming back and stop looking out for things and so on. Then another important thing is, and these are just tips, right? There could be exceptions here and there, but try to have a consistent presence across all platforms. Now you can think of it like this, that the posts that you think put out on social media are actually in some way conveying a personality of the church or the ministry. Like this is who we are. This is our flavor. This is, you know, this is how we work. So it's conveying a personality of the ministry. So while a personality can have different sides, yet all of those sides come together. They communicate a uniform, a singular message. This is who the person is, while the person does have different sides to him or her. So similarly, when you're talking about a church or the ministry, while definitely the church or the ministry has a lot of different things happening, yet this is who the church is or the ministry is overall. Right. So having a consistent look and feel across platforms is important. Now, what does it mean? Like, for instance, if one has a very classic look, okay, it looks like this and one is something really totally opposite to it in terms of colors, in terms of presentation. People get confused. It's like, okay, so what is this church really all about? Or what does this mean it's really about? Is it this or is it that? Is it what I'm seeing on this platform? Is it what I'm seeing on that platform? What is this church really? So it could confuse people on the culture and the personality of the church. So I try to keep, and this is where what we talked in one of our earlier classes about having guidelines for your graphics or your videos and everybody following that. So there's some sort of a consistency, a uniformed message that is got across to people, across all platforms. A third one is to encourage sharing, which is sharing is like the word of mouth of social media. So we understand word of mouth in our human interactions. You tell somebody, hey, that restaurant is really good. Then what is that person most likely going to do? They're going to go to that restaurant and they're going to try out that food there. So what was that? That is a word of mouth influence. In the social media space, sharing something is equivalent to the word of mouth on human interaction. So when somebody shares on their own timeline something about your church and so on, it kind of gets attention. It could, and nothing always it does, but it could direct people to come and explore things for themselves. So encourage that. Of course, you don't want to force people. You don't say you must do it or don't bang on their heads. Just a general thing, hey, if you like this, why don't you share? And some people do it. And many times people really like something. They'll want to share it with their circle of influence. Another good thing to do when you're using social media is to use hashtags. I think many of you may be familiar with it. So what does the hashtag do? It actually, it serves many purposes. First of all, it kind of gives a little, it categorizes or it indicates a particular topic that content has to do with. So when you say, you know, example, hashtag end times. Okay, then you're saying, okay, this is connected to end times or hashtag prophetic or hashtag healing. So you say, okay, this content is on that topic or in that category and also makes it searchable because that particular social media platform, whichever you're using is going to use those tags to aggregate content and search based on that. And people will also, you know, who are interested in certain hashtags, they will be shown things that you've put out if they're interested in those topics and in those categories of topics. So you can, you know, you can put it out hashtag whenever the beginning, middle or end of your media comment. And basically you're using characters all in one line without spaces and hashtags. So, you know, you could just give an example here. So then, okay, this, that means this content is from all people's church, Bangalore. So people who like that, who have been looking into this, they will be most likely shown this content. And so on. So these hashtags are very important on social media. That's how content is pushed. That's how content is found. And then they actually may come to your, to your channel to look at what you're putting out. So using hashtags intelligently really helps make your channel visible or the content that you're putting out makes it visible. Right? So use it for all social media posts, whether it's a videographic or a text, use it for everything, you know. And again, how many hashtags do you use? Well, generally you would use three to five. That's optimal. Some people may do more, some may do less. But you don't, using numerous, I think beyond 15 makes it meaningless. Like it's the platform itself is not going to make use of that many tags. So they probably, you know, works with maybe three to five or a little more than that. But just, you know, putting lots and lots of tags doesn't mean it's going to make your content that much visible. No, so use it judiciously. So general guidelines is use three to five tags. If you do seven or eight, that's okay. But that's what is optimal for tagging your content. Where, where, where useful, you could actually put it in your title as part of your title. You can use that. And it will also make it increase visibility, discoverability, if you would like to do that. And so try to, and I'm not saying, you know, we need to be always be using what's trending, but using what is trending helps give visibility. And so use, you try to look at, you know, what are the great keywords I must use? You could use keyword planners like Google has a keyword planner tool that's available. There are other hashtag keyword search tools. So try to use keywords that are relevant. You know, so example, if, if you're targeting Christian community, okay, if that message or the content is about healing and deliverance, then okay, use those relevant tags, you know, divine healing or healing and deliverance or hashtag supernatural or hashtag miracle service. Those are, you know, tags that are relevant to that community. Of course, in relation also to the content you're putting out. So it can help in making your content visible to other people. Another thing about social media is, you know, try and respond to questions or things that are expressed on your social media. Now, we, we try, but I don't think, you know, I'm talking about APC. And I don't think we are like very good in this, but, you know, because it does require time and effort and you need to have somebody doing it. But wherever possible, you know, when people ask a question or try to respond, ask a question or make a comment that requires a response, then of course it's, it's good that somebody's watching and will respond to those questions on, on your social media platforms. Sometimes, you know, the comments are just generic. You don't have to respond to every comment, but where they're asking for some information, it's good to show that you respond because other people are watching the interaction that's happening and they see that, okay, this church is responding, so on. So we do, for our Sunday services, for example, when our Sunday services are live, we do have designated moderators. Like people are there at that time. So if there's a question or some comment, there are people who can respond to that. You know, so when the services live on YouTube, on Facebook, Instagram, or Facebook and I think even on Twitter. So there are people, we have people moderating it. So when there are comments or questions, they're able to respond. So we try to that extent be a little prompt in responding to these comments. Some other other tips, you know, you try to determine what is the best time to post. That is the time when most of your people, it depends of course on your audience, but when are they most likely for, they are going to be on social media, on their accounts, you know, just browsing their phone or doing something. So that would be the best time to release content and so that you can have higher engagement. And then after that, you know, the curve starts coming down. If it's not, you know, if there are not that many views and so on. But if there are views, then of course it picks up, kind of rides the wave. So depending on your audience and when they are using social media, you try to time your post so that as soon as you post, you are getting reactions to your post and that kind of keeps moving the post up further. So you can look at Facebook Insights, for example, to get an idea of when people are online, people who are following your Facebook page. When are people online? And it tells you, okay, here's generally when most of your people are active. So therefore you can then time your post on that day or that time that hour of the day or that day of the week. And so, okay, you know, most important posts are going to come out then. Now you'll see a distribution. Now typically people say, okay, Thursdays are when people, a lot of people are active for whatever reason. So if that's what you find, then it's okay. I'm going to release my most important content on that day at that time. Other things will keep coming through of course on other days, but that might be a good time to release very important content. Okay, but you can get insight on how people are interacting, your audience is engaging from looking at Facebook Insights. Other things that you can consider doing is to do paid promotions and advertising on social media platforms. So that's how many of these platforms make their money through paid promotions and advertising. So if you want to, you could also promote your event through paid promotions, running ads on these platforms. It definitely gives visibility. It definitely is, you know, comparatively it's very economical. So if you compare that with printing actual handbills and trying to get those handbills of flyers, printed flyers out to people, there's a cost involved in printing all of that, in packaging all of them, or in distributing all of them. How are we planning to distribute? Whereas social media platforms are a very good alternative. Several advantages, they are very cost effective. And second, you are coming in front of people in a non-intrusive manner. It's like, okay, if they don't want, they just call past. It's not, you're not being too in your face or thing. Whereas, you know, a handbill, you might, if you're distributing handbills on a street corner or you're having to mail it to people's homes, you know, things like that. It's like, in some way, it could be intrusive if you are standing and distributing flyers. Whereas the social media, the graphics or the video just comes in in their feed. If they want to, they can see it. Otherwise, they just scroll past it or skip it. So, and it also gives you access to lots of people. You can cover huge ground, multiple cities, cover an entire country or multiple countries globally. You can target your promotions. You can target by interests. You can target by other demographic factors. So, doing all of this is very useful. Just to keep us all awake, let me see if I can... It runs with me so far? Okay. Let me just see if I can log into our Facebook account. Just to show you some ads we run. It's been a while since I... I hope it doesn't tell me to log in. Okay, got to log in. Enter the code. Let me see. Just give me a minute. Enter code. Okay. We are in. I'm sorry. It's been a while since I kind of came in here. But I think I will remember what is doing. So, you see these posts are happening. Now, a lot of this is automated. So, you know, these posts... These are our daily devotional posts. And I think they should have some tags. Okay. So, giving some links and then we have these standard tags. All of you can see what I'm... I'm not sharing it, am I? Can you see what I'm showing? No, sir. Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. Sorry. I'm really sorry. I forgot to share my screen. Anyway, so I just logged into... Now you should be able to see. Yeah. Okay. Sorry. So, I just logged into our ABC Facebook account. It's been a while, so I might be a little rusty in this. But anyway. So, these posts happen automatically every day. These are daily devotionals. And I was just showing you, you know, these are tags. And all of these are pre-con, all set up earlier in advance. So it just gets pushed out to Facebook every day. And then, you know, our sermons come in, all of that. But what I want to show you is the ads. So, again, it's been a while, but let me go here. Ad Center. Yeah. In the Ad Center. Okay. So, you see, we've... Let's see. We've run this ad, which was... We were promoting our New Year's Day service. This ad, we spent just 7,000 rupees. But it reached 183,000 people. So, it had a good reason. If I recall correctly, we were just targeting people in our city. So, just going here, just inviting them to the New Year's service. And there were about 7,800 clicks. That means people actually clicked on the ad. And, you know, then they came to the website and so on. And then you can see, you know, how people are engaging with the ad. You can get some information, which age groups were engaging. You know, so you see a lot from the 25 to 34 male-female. And locations, of course, this was all primarily within our own city, is what we were targeting. But then there were others from other cities. Yeah. So, notice, we were running this within Bangalore 30 miles and also Mangalore 25 miles. So, we were targeting two cities, Bangalore and Mangalore, with this ad. So, just a quick, you know, look at that in terms of, you know, you can run the ad. There's the ads manager. So, you can promote. So, this was website. So, think about this ad. This is for a Bible college. We ran this ad. It reached 4.8 million people. We had 36,000 clicks. We just spent 20,000 rupees. That's it. So, for just 20,000 rupees, we had such a big reach. And this is global. So, it was running everywhere. You know, where are people on Facebook, English, they would be presented with this ad for a Bible college. So, just doing this, because this was run, I think. You can look at the results. Look at the cost. The cost is just 55 paisa per click. So, it's very cheap. And for us to get this kind of reach and this kind of engagement, it's actually very cheap. If you look at some, just some information here, demographics. You can see a lot of people in this age group, 24 to 34 were people who interacted with this ad. Of course, it was placed on different... You see a lot of mobile app interaction. And this is, of course, locations around the world. It may take some time, I think, because this will give you a list of all the cities where... And that might take some time. All right. So, just to give a quick idea that you can set up this ad. You can boost your post and really reach a lot of people. Similarly, I could show you how we run ads on YouTube where you can create a short video and promote the video on YouTube, like a 30-second YouTube video. You can set it up. You can actually target your audience. You can say which countries and you can say which language or which languages. You can say which age group. You can say which platform, which devices, you know, laptops or tablets or mobile devices or TV screens. So you can target the... How you want to... Where you want to push the ad. And then you run it. Now, YouTube is a little bit more expensive, but it's a video ad and really it gets... So you've got audio video. So it really gets people's attention when you run the ad. I mean, if... I don't know if I... I'm just thinking that I will be able to log in. It might log me out of... It's okay. Anyway, I just think if I log in there, it might log me out of Google because it's a Google account. Anyway, so thinking... Making use of social media ads is a good way to reach people these days, right? In contrast to distributing flyers and so on. It's amazing that, you know, like we can be sitting here in Bangalore and we can be running an ad on Facebook that is reaching every country on the earth, except in certain countries like, say, maybe Russia and China and North Korea and some other countries where, you know, the platform is not being used. But generally, otherwise, you can cover many, many... Globally, basically, you can reach just by pushing an ad on this platform and it's not expensive at all. All right, let me just finish up the few thoughts or the thoughts here on social media. So paid promotions, last two points. We can measure results, measure the outcomes like I was showing you. When you run an ad, you can see what are the outcomes. Plus generally, how is your Facebook page doing? You can monitor, you know, Facebook has an insights section where you can go and look at how your Facebook page is doing or YouTube similarly has information on, you know, who watched the video, which country, were they from, demographics, those kind of things. So, you know, how many minutes did they watch? Or if you're doing a live stream, when was the peak? Number of viewers, live viewers, all that information these platforms provide, which is very useful if you're trying to analyze how you are doing on these social media platforms. So many of these platforms give that kind of information. You can go look at it. You can tell your team members, say, hey, look at it. See how you're doing. See what can we do to improve, right? In addition to these analytics that's already provided with the platforms, you can also use third-party tools to monitor and to listen to what's happening. So, if you go to this link, I think this is pretty useful. Let me just go over there just to show you So, I've just gone to that last link that I gave you in the PDF. So, this is a useful article. It shows you, you know, what are the tools available for social media monitoring? That is what is happening on your website? Oh, sorry, on your particular social media channel that we're using. And what is the mood of people responding to you? Are they angry? Are they supportive? Are they encouraging? How are the hashtags doing? And it also tells you, you know, it also listens, meaning, kind of gives you some insight on how you're on the trend on your particular platform. What can you look forward to some predictive things that are predictive in nature? So, using these tools will give you this kind of information. Then on this link, if you go down, there are some other useful articles there on, let's see, on here, on what tags you can use, templates that you could use, best time to post. So, you know, you've got all these useful articles that you could look up and get some information. So, I just wanted to point you that, you know, the information is available on these things. And if you can take some time to just explore, that will be useful. Oops. I'll get rid of this. Okay. All right. Any questions on that so far? On social media? Okay. Just give us a little bit of idea. I'm going to just introduce our next chapter, and then we will continue this tomorrow. In our next chapter, I want to just spend some time talking about digital equipment. So, when we talk about digital equipment, we're going to talk about, just give a little idea about cameras, about audio equipment, video equipment, and live streaming equipment. Now, this is not a technical, it's not going to be a very technical lesson, but the intent is for you and me to have some idea. So, when people, when your team members come and talk to you, or, you know, we want to buy a camera, or we want to buy, you know, we want to buy some audio equipment, or we want to buy some equipment for live streaming, at least you have some idea that, okay, this is how it happens. Now, you know, there are so many variations out there, so many different kinds of cameras, so many different kinds of audio configurations, or live streaming configurations, lots of different variations out there, lots of different ways to make things happen. But the goal in this lesson on digital equipment is just to kind of give you some idea, like, this is what's there, at least know these, be aware, so that when people come to you, if you are going to be one of the decision makers, the important thing is for you to ask, to be able to ask the right questions, you know, to make the decision. Example, if you are the pastor of a church, sure, the team members there who are handling the video production or the audio, they'll be handling it, but usually the decision for approval to buy something, to buy an equipment, to buy something that they want, comes to you, right? So they will say, hey, we need to buy this. Now, one way to do it is just to trust them and sign it off, or other ways to ask questions. For example, just yesterday, you know, I received a request from our audio engineer, they wanted to buy a mixer for one of our church locations. So they sent this thing in. So, okay, now I have to approve it. But then I look at it and then my immediate question is, do we need to buy this? So they had requested for a 20-channel mixer. My question was, do you need a 20-channel mixer? We already have a six-channel mixer. You know, why do you need a 20-channel? Can't we do it something less? So how many inputs are coming in right now? So on, so forth. Now their reasoning would be, oh, we are preparing for the future. Well, you know, do you want to jump to a 20-channel? Or can we do enough of the 16-channel? So finally, because I asked the question, everything changed and the price came down by 50%. And we settled for a different mixer, which was just 16-channels. So yeah, 16-channels, 16 or whatever it was. Okay. But anyway, so the point is this, right? They are doing their work. They come to you for approval. You need to have at least some amount of information to ask the right questions. You don't have to know everything about the technology, but just some information. Let's ask the right questions. Do we really need this or how about this and so on? So I'm sharing that, I'm sharing the next lesson on digital equipment from that perspective, just to give us sufficient information on various aspects of what will usually be involved in our audio-video production for a typical church or Christian ministry so that you understand what is happening and you are able to answer questions or make informed decisions. And a lot of these things, even I didn't know, for instance, a long time ago, somebody came and said, we need to buy a snake cable. I had never heard of something like that. What do you mean we need to buy a snake cable? Then they had to explain to me what a snake cable was and then I understood why we need to buy that. And then that's our... So there's a learning process to all of this, but I just wanted to share the information that we have so far and it will help you in your making decisions for your ministry. So we get into this chapter tomorrow. We do digital equipment and just run through things and then we're kind of becoming close to completion of the course. After we do digital equipment, we will run through software platforms, things that you can use for your church and ministry. Okay, any questions so far? All right, let's close in prayer. Just request somebody to close. We'll pick this up tomorrow. So we can pray and dismiss us. Dear God, thank you so much for everything that you do, God. Thank you all for telling me a great question. You've always done something wonderfully beautiful. And we may always go out to know that there's you and every great God. That you're the creator of everything and you have given the intelligence and kind. That Jesus and everything that you do will be the first and center of your lives. Thank you, God, for this. As we learn about social technology, God, thank you so much for doing that for me. Now, just hearing, but also, Lord, that you have something for us to do with it to share your good news through this. Thank you, God. Thank you, Lord, for everything. I pray for my class. God, is there about to say, Lord, that they will see the goodness and mercy that you have in life. Now, I also pray a blessing with that salvation and also, Lord, thank you all for being with me to our life's kind. I pray so much for everything that you do. Man. Thank you, everyone. See you all tomorrow. God bless. Enjoy the rest of your day. Bye now. Thank you, Pastor. Thank you. Thank you, Pastor. God bless. Bye now. Thank you, Pastor. Thank you.