 Okay. I'm just waiting for the recording to start. Okay. Good morning everyone. Welcome to the class BC314 on media and technology and ministry. Sorry for missing the classes last week. We will definitely catch up and cover everything that we intended to cover in this course. Let's pray together before we start. Can I request somebody to pray? Thomas, God bless you. Would you like to pray Thomas and help us start? It's your first time. Thank you. Father in Jesus name we thank you for this wonderful day Lord. Thank you for your mercy and grace. They are new every morning. Father as we sit to listen from your word. Let the spirit of wisdom rest upon us. Help us to understand that we thank you Starshis. Anoint him and Father let me grow in the kingdom. We bless you. We give you glory. Let the service be blessed in Jesus name we pray. Amen. Amen. Amen. Thank you. Good morning and welcome everybody to this course on media and technology and ministry. So last week we didn't have classes. I apologize for that. The week before we covered some of the distribution channels. We talked about the various ways in which we can distribute content online through online platforms. I give you the list. As and when your church or your ministry grows and then you want to think about distributing content you can consider some of those platforms. So today what I would like us to look at is social media platforms which you know I think many of us are familiar with and are already using some of these platforms but I just want to touch on things that would be relevant in terms of how to use the platforms not so much as which platforms but you know some things to keep in mind as we use social media to engage with our audiences whether it's people in the congregation or people outside the congregation. So along those lines to share some thoughts and see if you would be interested in taking it and making use of it in your church in your ministry. We'll do that today. I think we will be able to cover that chapter and then from tomorrow onwards we'll start talking about equipment. So we want to talk about the hardware and software that we use in various things that we would be doing in ministry just to give us an exposure and when you have to make decisions you know on those things it'll be useful but let's try and see if we can discover the usage of social media today and these are just some guidelines to keep in mind. So you know social media has become a big thing in people's lives today for good or for better or for worse it's become a big thing and as we saw in a very first lecture when you look at the current data the number of hours people spend on the internet in general and social media in one of one or more of these platforms it's huge. You know an hour or more we just talk about averages we're not saying that every individual but in average on an average people are spending several hours a day on social media on multiple platforms. So it is important for us as a church as a Christian ministry to say okay look this is where people are then that's where we need to go and you know engage with them so we don't look at these social media platforms as taboo or bad no it's just where people are and so we need to be able to very intelligently see how we can engage with people right now some churches take the position that oh we will not engage with social media at all it's bad it's a waste of time this that personally my conviction is we don't need to take that stand rather we should say that look this is where people are then let's look at ways by which we can meaningfully engage people build relationships with people wherever they are and in this particular case social media platforms. Now some of the current platforms of course you know here's again platforms come and go things were there things platforms that were popular several years ago have disappeared and some have stayed and endured through time and you know we don't know what you know six months from today what would be there but some of the more stable more you know well established platforms which we are all familiar with Facebook Twitter LinkedIn and of course teenagers and young people are heavy on Instagram and TikTok and then there are other specialized type of platforms been interested in Reddit so LinkedIn of course it's you know a professional community it's meant for it's it's targeting working people or sorry I shouldn't say it's more of a professional type of social platform but it's good as a church to have a presence there because of that's kind of the people you're looking at reaching then it's good to be on that so the question I think to begin with is to find out for the audience that you are targeting right or maybe you have a diverse audience you know you may be having of course teenagers young adults may have others you may have professionals in your audience so you need to have a some idea now what are the social media platforms that people in your audience are spending time on so that of course you could engage with them on those platforms right so if people in example if there are a lot of young people teenagers young you know young adults in your congregation or in in your audience people that you're targeting then it's very likely they are very active on Instagram and TikTok you may not find them on LinkedIn you may not find them on Twitter but you'll find them on Instagram and TikTok if so like that you know just you need to have a good some idea okay this is where my people are and of course you may want to you know target multiple platforms and that's okay because you know in any congregation you have different age groups and segments of people and so you may need to do multiple platforms but find out the ones that you feel you should focus on and when I say research I don't mean like heavy-duty research it's just like looking across your congregation and you know just getting a feel of where people are that's enough so what I wanted to share is some you know some practical things on how do you engage with people on social media because the fact is they are spending time you know on a daily basis or at least on a weekly basis and people are spending time on social media so it's good that as a church or a ministry you have something happening where you can connect with people how do you go about doing it and here are some practical things one is it's very important it's very important to do regular posts from your church or ministry and of course you brand it that means you know it should be your church's facebook page or you know instagram account and it has your church logo or your church name on it so people know that okay this church or this ministry is putting out this kind of content so and there's nothing wrong you know basically as a church you're reaching out to the community that you are interested in or to the people that you're interested in so there's nothing wrong that you your church has a facebook page or an instagram account that is branded and named by your church or ministry and it's reaching out nothing wrong with that okay but then the key is to do a regular post don't do it randomly occasionally you know so people don't know when you're posting but if you do a regular post something that has created an expectation and people looking forward to then that would be useful so just some ideas you know for instance some of the things that we do and which I think almost any church can do is we put out our Sunday sermon the edited version of the Sunday sermon so happens on Sunday by latest usually by Monday or latest by Tuesday that edited sermon that's just a sermon part comes out then you know another sermon maybe 45 minutes long which is a lot of time for many people and so they may not want a full sermon so some people may want just the key points so we also have a five minute version of the Sunday sermon we call it key points which also goes out by Monday or Tuesday and then of course to the younger generation they just want to highlight hey if there were five key points what was the main point so we have a smaller version a 60 second or less version which is just one statement key statement from the whole sermon you know so you know we're looking at different interest levels and availability right some people would don't mind listening to the whole sermon some people may be able to afford five minutes some people just keep I'll give you a minute tell me something you know so we are putting all of that out on of course it goes on all our platforms so wherever people are engaging they're able to get it and this happens every week right every week so those are interested can look forward to it on a weekly basis right so they know and every Monday or every Tuesday these things are coming out from this church the sermon part we also have you know we also announce uh what we do is we announce the coming sermon that means the coming Sunday sermon title and all of that by usually by Friday now some people like it some people don't like the idea they say why do you want to tell people keep it as a suspense and you know make them come to church but we feel that we can let people know ahead of time what is this upcoming sermon sometimes it could be a guest speaker or sometimes it's part of a sermon series but they know what to expect you're already setting the expectation and sometimes if they're thinking about inviting their friend you know they could decide like okay yeah this sermon title seems to be relevant for my friend or or maybe I should not invite them whatever you know so we feel we are looking at from that perspective and so every Friday there's an announcement there's a graphic that goes out that announces the so the title of the sermon coming Sunday so you know I'm not saying you have to do it I'm just saying you know this is what we do and of course there are other event announcements if anything else is happening you also announce that then something we started doing maybe just a year back or so is we put out testimonies that come in of course these are a brief of the testimony start the whole testimony we do it anonymously that means we don't reveal the name or any of those details and people know that when they send a testimony we are going to share it so it's an implicit or implied permission and so and we don't reveal anybody's names if somebody sends a testimony not to that particular email ID but some other way then we check with them can we share your testimony anonymous way on our platforms and we get the permission then do it so these testimonies are a very good thing which you know or to do because then people know that something is happening in this church or in this ministry lives are being touched in such and such manner and it's a good thing you're doing it to promote but you're letting your creating awareness and of course you're glorifying the work of God glorifying God other things that you could do is just normal pictures and videos of what's happening in the church yeah just these are all the scandid shots of what's going on the church service sometimes you could get people to share their individual experiences you show people volunteering and serving at an event or something or part of the regular service it gives the outside people a feel of oh this is what the church is this is what the community is like you know and it lets people know and sometimes that can actually now welcome people to the church it's like hey these people are just regularly today people and they're all working together and they seem to be having a good time and they're happy and serving God and so it just draws people to your congregation or ministry and of course in cases where you need to get permission do that you know if if you're putting pictures of children and so on so forth and and and if you're having special events like conferences seminars mission trips programs you can put those pictures and videos which again is is a nice way to let people know what your church is about right so these are just some ideas but if you do it in a very systematic way that means it's good it's happening right regularly that is the key and rather than doing you know you know what happened once a month or once a year or once in a few months if it's happening regularly like your your sermons or your other events that is key it keeps people engaged on those platforms another practical tip is when you're using social media platforms maintain a consistent look and feel across all platforms that means people you know there is creativity there's different expressions but people should not get confused on what kind of a church you are example just example so you know so we use the word personalities meaning if you know or in one place you're you're you're you're making your church look as very sober very you know very reverent and then another in another place you know it looks very unlike that you know then people get a confused message you know because sometimes people may look at both platforms I'm not saying don't be creative but don't be you know don't use different creative ideas but what I'm saying is the look and feel who you are what is your church about coming the message coming through must be consistent across all platforms because people may tend to see you on multiple platforms it should not send contrary or confusing message so that's the point right so maintain a very consistent look and feel a consistent personality or a consistent messaging across all platforms not to confuse your audience okay another simple tip is to encourage people to share so you know sharing is like the word of mouth so you know the word of mouth is very powerful if if somebody invites a friend that says come to hey would you like to come to church that is more powerful than just you know randomly dropping invites into people's homes telling them to come to church now there's nothing wrong in you know sending in invitations somebody may come but the word of mouth personal invitation is very powerful because there is trust and there's relationship and comfort all of that so on social media sharing is kind of equivalent to the word of mouth so when you tell people in your congregation hey why don't you share this link with your friends now of course you don't want to force people or you don't want to make people obligated to it it's just a request you know you just so you know on Sundays we tell you know the person who's starting the worship would say or you know you'd welcome and then you say why don't you share the link now with somebody invite them or when we're doing other posts we say no please share with others so it's just an invitation it's not a compulsion but that sharing is very powerful because they would obviously share it with people who are connected to them on social media they will share it on their timeline or some form and it means that they are telling their friends they're telling people in their circle of influence hey I like this I'm going here so on so there's automatically a trust level and this is all happening on social media so without forcing people or without you know making them feel obligated you can just encourage people you know why don't you share with your friends and it's harmless you know you're just sharing it on your own timeline it's a very simple thing harmless thing to do and most people would be happy to do that okay so another useful thing maybe more than useful or I would say a necessary thing is to use hashtags along with your posts on social media so whatever you place after the hashtag is like a search keyword or a search phrase by which your content is being indexed by the search algorithm that's behind that platform so example on Facebook or on Instagram or any of these social media platforms when you do your post and then you put your hashtag usually you would do up about three hashtags and different platforms have a different you know I'm not saying standard but recommendations on how many hashtags are optimal so maybe on Facebook three on Instagram you can go up to 30 but doesn't mean you have to put 30 hashtags just means you can you know can go up to 30 so Facebook you can put more but just putting minimal about three is makes the post effective so like that what you do is use these hashtags to indicate what your content is about and to generate interest in your post if you don't use hashtag you're missing out on making your post and content searchable and visible to other people right so put some hashtags just even three hashtags anywhere you know in your post and you know you're indicating that it's on this topic or this category and so on right so simple thing you know so basically it's a it's a keyword or a key phrase and you can put it in the top middle bottom of your text and this is the normal way to do it right you don't use any space don't use no don't use any special characters for example all people search Bangalore or you want to you would a better way to do it is like this right that you use mixed case so it's easier to read or capitalize each individual word but make sure there's no space no underscore no hayfin no special character there like that so you can say this is an online church service so people are interested in that can go or then you could use things for you know related to the topic of your sermon related to the content of your post things like that so what happens that indexes that post makes it searchable so people are interested in that kind of a theme topic etc they can see this right so it helps your content to be found by the right people people who might be interested in it and it will drive traffic to your content right so basically you are targeting and you're making your post more visible when you add hashtags along with your post okay now other thing on social media is to respond to questions comments etc right especially questions or negative comments concerns now if people say you know I like this or you know people may just do a like or you know a positive comment okay you know you don't have to respond to it but if people are asking questions how do I come to church what time is your service etc or you know or it's good to respond to it because what happens is others are watching others are seeing you know how you are interacting with people and so it kind of in some ways telling people that look I care about your questions I care about your concerns I care about your comments now of course I don't do this you know we have somebody else doing or handling this so depending on you know the availability of your time so you have to be careful you know you don't want to get all your time gone and especially if you're a pastor or a leader you may not be able to spend the time responding to comments and so on so you can assign somebody else you know like just keep a watch on what's happening on the church Facebook page Instagram account or you know whatever it is and if there are questions or there are comments please respond on behalf of the church you can delegate the work because you yourself may not may not have the time but the idea is if we are responsive to people they will feel comfortable they'll feel happy that you know the church cares about their questions and concerns and it's a good tool for building relationships so you're actually making use of the platform you're building relationships and people may based on that decide to even come to the church okay so that's a that's a simple thing important thing but it's not always easy because it requires time and that's where maybe we should delegate it to people who can do it on behalf of the church and another another interesting thing and this is just a thought for for you to keep in mind is to make your posts at an optimal time now why is that first of all why is something like that important because a the first few hours of posting if you get engagement then these algorithms that are working on the on the social media platforms the recommendation engines they will begin to show your posts to more audience like they they it's almost like or they recognize that people are interested in this so let's show it to more people so we're going a step further it's not only about making a post but if you can post it at an optimal time where most of your audience are online and are likely to see it or engage with the post then it's going to increase its probability of being presented or shown to more people by the algorithms that are running behind the platform so that is why the right time to post is useful so depending on where you're posting and and I don't I'm not I'm not saying this always has to be but this is just a thought to keep in mind it's a useful thing you know you're thinking about when are people in my audience your target audience when are they most likely to be online you know so you ask questions like which day of the week and which time of day so you want to target those kinds of things and in some cases it's just a you know just an announcement you post anything okay but sometimes if you're really interested in you know optimizing your views your engagement with your post you may look at okay which day of the week would most people in my audience people that I'm targeting be online would it be a Sunday would it be a Saturday or would it be like a Thursday or a Friday generally you know now again this I'm speaking in general terms generally people say okay we know between Thursday to Sunday social media engage activity goes up Thursday because beginning of the week people are like I'm getting back to you know I'm getting back to work and you know so now some people may still be on it but generally Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday more people are you know carving out some time to check on their friends or engage on social media so okay so you have that window but in what time of day again generally speaking evenings are better right because mornings nobody's going to really be on social media they're all getting ready to work getting ready to school evening local time talking about and if you're targeting your audience locally yeah that's when most of them would be taking a little time to just check on what's happening on their Facebook or Instagram or things like that so this is a general thing later time later part of the week evenings is when most people are engaging with social so that's that's a higher it's a better time to post but now you need to know a little bit more specific about your own audience right just to guess we're not trying to just do some heavy duty research here just to guess okay maybe Friday evenings are better etc so certain kinds of posts you do with Friday evening 8 p.m or 7 p.m or 8 p.m you know depending on when your people most active will be the best time to put out your post chance of hired chance of engaging that's what you're looking at which will eventually result in more reach and more engagement now if you want to get a little bit technical on it you can look at the data the analytics so almost all of these social media posts will give you some information so a simple way is on Facebook there's a insights tab or insights page where you can go and it'll tell you okay you know this is this is your post that's doing most well this is when people are looking at your post give you some data and that will help you understand that you know this is when people are online this one people this is these are kind of posts they like the engaging so you can use that to help improve when you do your post right so one is you can just have a general understanding and that's good enough if you want to get a little bit more data specific you can look at the num insights given and then based on that you can make decisions I'm not saying this this always has to be but this just a good thing to be aware of and to use a few more things before we close on this is most social media platforms they also have paid promotions and advertising but I would definitely encourage you to use if you're promoting an event or inviting people to church and so on you know it's very cost effective even if you spend and I'm just speaking in rupees which is like even if you spend 500 rupees which is less than you know one dollar yeah one dollar no one dollar seventy so less than ten dollars even if you suspend 100 rupees you can reach in your say within your city within your target audience and you want to target let's say you want to target you want to promote an event in your city or you just want to invite people to your church service in your city so what do you do you create a graphic for that event or for the church service an example you can use facebook and say I'm running a paid promotion on facebook for one day or two days or three days whatever however you want and you just want to spend 500 rupees per day for three days you can do it and on an average you can you know for 500 rupees you can probably reach I don't know what the number would be but maybe like 10 000 people or more and it's very very cost effective and you can do it just you know within a few minutes you set the ad up submit it they will review it approve it and it's on there's nothing it's not too difficult now think about what you know what can you do if find it rupees if you were going to do it physically you would not even be able to print 10 000 handles for 500 rupees but using the social media platform you're able to reach example 10 000 people with just 500 rupees inviting them to church or inviting them to your event just just a very simple thing so using paid promotions advertising is useful when you target your audience you should know what your audience are interested in and you target them it's a good thing to do okay so keep that in mind a few other side comments before we close is like we said you can see how your page is doing using the analytics information that come with most of these platforms so on facebook there's an insights page and it'll show you about you know your people the people who are connected to your page and how how they're doing how your posts are doing etc so it's good to so it's good to have a look at that from time to time just to improve what you need to improve in using that particular platform and the posts that you're doing now there are social media platform monitoring software so this is advanced so I'm not saying you have to do it but if you want to you know if you really want to monitor and track what's happening to your page to your brand how your posts are doing etc in a very advanced way there are software tools that you can go and you can say you know monitor my page monitor what's happening and you'll get your results that'll help you on you know on an advanced level to make improvement so this is simple you know you can actually see it and see what's happening this is something you have to set up and it's more for advanced the last block of information here is that I just shared you know so okay so to do these posts of course you need graphics you need you need to make it look simple attractive I mean to do something you know something that's simple attractive and so on so I've just said a list of links and I of course I got this from our team I asked them to send me this list and these are both free and paid websites and portals where you can get graphics videos fonts so you could reuse you know these as part of what you do in your media work for you can encourage either volunteers or your staff they'll make use of graphics videos that are available through these and I'm sure that there are many more but these are what these are what our team sent back to me and what they use so you could explore using these for your work just to make your content your posts attractive to your own audience okay so that's about what I wanted to share here on social media that if we can engage intelligently it will be useful now I don't want this to consume all our time in the ministry of course so if you can get ideally it'll be nice if you get volunteers in your church and your congregation in ministry and just delegate it to them and say guys you know just handle the social media pages for the church and just keep you informed and you can of course interact with them give them guidance tell them what what needs to be done and especially if you have young people they would be more than happy to do this as part of the church's ministry so I'm not saying that as a pastor or as a Christian leader you should get involved in all the details you just have an idea just know that these are the possibilities these are the opportunities these are the details that should be attended to when doing when engaging on social media so then you can just you know get a team of volunteers or others to work on it just oversee the work tell them hey this is what we're doing let them come back to you on progress and then you can share ideas on you know how they can take it forward on behalf of the church and the ministry okay so I'm going to stop here let me see if there are any comments or questions from anybody on this any thoughts any questions any clarifications you would like here on this or any more information everyone's okay all right so tomorrow we'll start talking about getting into the equipment side just as a way of you know knowledge of knowing what is used where so that when you have people serving in your congregation or in your ministry you'll be able to interact with them meaningfully okay we're going to close and we will dismiss care or conan could you either one of you pray close and dismiss please can you pray and send us please yes sir whether we just come before once again you're thrown or what we want to just say thanking your father for this object thanking you for the court for your revelation and understanding and wisdom for the court to this subject thinking your father could help us to move forward for the court thinking you almighty Jesus name we pray all right thank you everyone um I'll see you again tomorrow we have three hours together tomorrow God bless bye now