 Okay. Welcome back everybody to our second lecture, BC 314 Media and Technology. This lecture is not going to be too long, maybe, I don't know, maybe 10-15 minutes. We're going to spend a little bit of time just talking about social media. So in the previous chapter, or the previous two chapters, we talked about digital engagement, and we just said some guidelines on how we can optimize, how we can do our graphics and videos well, and how we can optimize them for search engines so that they become more visible in this vast ocean of content that people are putting out every day, there's so much of content being put out. So we just follow some guidelines in terms of title, description, tags and so on. The possibility of being more visible to people and being presented to people increases. Now, we're going to talk a little bit about social media and how, as from a church perspective, how we can leverage that. So we obviously, when we talk about social media, we need to answer a simple question. In terms of our target audience, as a church or ministry, it's okay, where are our audience? What are they engaging on, Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn or any of those large number of platforms that are there? Where are they engaging and where do you want to engage people? So as a church, for us, we are primarily, we are looking, we are engaging with people primarily on these three platforms on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram. We're not doing too much on the other platforms, but depending on whom you want to reach, you will engage with people. So once you kind of decide on what social media platforms you want to be on, and we're not talking about the other platforms we already mentioned earlier, but once you decide on that, then what are some things to do? We need to do regular posts that are from the church or the ministry. So some of the things that we do, and I'm just sharing some ideas, not saying everybody has to do this, but just as a might isn't what we do, is in addition to the livestream which happens of our Sunday sermon on Sunday on YouTube, we post, we edit the sermon, that means we take out the worship parts and just the sermon part, we edit the sermon, and that sermon is put out separately on YouTube and other platforms. We also do sermon key points, which is a five-minute summary of the sermon. So that means, you know, those who say, well, I can't sit and watch the full 40-minute sermon, just tell me the key points for them. You know, this thing helps, they may be interested. And some people don't even want five minutes, they just want, give me one point on the sermon. So this is that sermon highlight, so we also do a 60-second highlight of the sermon. So this is what you can pack in 60 seconds, and that goes out on these channels. So we're giving people a lot of options. There is the full livestream that they can go and watch, or they can watch just the sermon, the full sermon, or they can watch five minutes of the sermon, or they can watch 60 seconds of that sermon, one minute of that sermon. So all these options are there, and these things go out, usually by Monday, they are released on these platforms. Then the other thing that we do is, usually by Friday of the week, we announced what is the sermon coming up for Sunday, the sermon title, although those kind of things work. The reason they do it is just to not only inform, but hopefully try to generate interest. Hey, this coming Sunday, I'm going to hear about this. So sometimes that sermon title might interest them, they will come with expectation. Sometimes they might think about inviting their friends. They'll say, hey, this sermon would be useful for them. So they'd invite them to come. So we do that every Friday. There's a graphic that goes out saying, coming on Sunday, this is the sermon title and so on. Now, of course, if it's a guest speaker, then we won't know what the guest speaker is preaching generally. So we just put the name of the person who's preaching. But if it's our own people, we know what we're going to be preaching. Then, typically, we also put out announcements of other events on our social media platforms. Sometimes we post testaments in an anonymous way. We don't mention names of people. So as and when this testimony comes, a little graphic with a brief summary of the testimony goes. Time-to-time happenings, that's services, volunteers, pictures about the life of the church or highlighting special events, et cetera, go up. I just think we get a feel of what's happening. We don't overload people with that. Obviously, we're not like putting every photograph online, but there's some little taste of what's happening at the event or at somebody's serving and so on. So these are kinds of things that we post on our social media platforms as a way to engage with people. Now, of course, we use LinkedIn in a different way. So whatever I said is what happened on Facebook and Instagram, but LinkedIn is targeting professionals. So for that, it's a different thing that we do. We post short articles related to people in the workplace so that that might be of interest to them. We have somebody who does that, one of our touch people who will do that. They'll take a summary of some text or something from our books and posts just to engage with people on LinkedIn and keep them interested and so on. Now, when we're using social media, some thoughts, here are just some good things to do. It's not a rule, but just some gentle thing. We try to make your messaging that is the look and feel of your posts, it should look and feel the same across all platforms because really you're creating a persona or a personality of who you are as an individual or who this entity is as a community. It's creating a persona. So it's important that there is a consistent look and feel, a consistent messaging, a consistent persona that comes across. People look at that and say, yeah, this is a church that does it like this. So maintain a consistent look and feel. Like we said earlier, the forms we use, the colors we use, the casts you use, how you're communicating comes across consistently. Now, one of the things that we've done intentionally is not to create a personality around the individual. So right from the very beginning, actually in the very beginning we were very strict. I told our media team, don't put pictures of me on the cover of any of the graphics. So we stayed away from creating a persona or a personality around the individual. We said it should be around the community, around the church. So in all the posts that we do, we stayed away from that. Only maybe a couple of years ago, the media team said, can we use pictures of the person who's doing the daily devotional? Just for the daily devotional, can we use them so that people know who's doing the devotional? And just for that, we have given permission. So only for our daily devotionals on the cover of the video, you will see the picture of the person doing the daily devotional. Otherwise, we said, no one else. So we don't want to create a persona around the individual. Let's do it around the church community. And that's our choice. A lot of churches and other ministries may do it differently. You'll find pictures of the pastor or the leader coming up everywhere, everywhere. That's okay, that's their choice. But our choice was stay away from individual and create around the community so that individuals will come and go, but the community continues. So that's long term. And so that's kind of what we are creating. Sharing content is like the word of mouth on social media. So I encourage people to share on their posts, on their timeline. We don't force people to do it. We just can request them, hey, if you like it, share it. Very important when you're doing your post is to use hashtags. That's part of the word or the keyword. But we're saying that this content is about this topic or in this category. And so that helps the search engines index the post and make it visible to other people. And when people search for a keyword or hashtag, that's related, it'll come up. So typically, you're using it as a word without spaces or numbers, no special characters. Like this or lower case. I think most people are familiar with it. So these hashtags are important because that's what helps that content, the graphic or the video that you're posted be found by the right people or interested in those kinds of things. And of course, it should be relevant to what you've posted. Typically, the suggestion is to use what three to five hashtags for every post. Don't put 100 hashtags. It normally doesn't use beyond for the first 15 hashtags. So the top three to five is what would be used optimally. So use that. And you can use hashtags that are related to your brand. So for example, we use all people's church bangles. So if somebody searches by that, they will bring all our content will come up. So you can kind of create some sort of a brand online by which people know what you're doing. Or you can use that. And you could include hashtags and titles and sentences. If you have space for it, you can do that as well. So if you want to know what are the right hashtags to use, you can use, there are some tools that help you find the right hashtags, like Google keyword planner or Instagram tag search. So they give you ideas on what tags to use, what tags would be most useful for your content. Here are the points here is that when you're doing your social media posts, of course, there will be people who will respond, who will put comments or so on. We ask questions, ask for more information, try and respond to these so that people know that you're active, you're interested in engaging with people. Again, we have certain people who are responsible for this, so they will handle it. I personally, I don't have time to even see what's happening, but generally there are people who are handling all of this. They will respond or they will see what's happening and look to that. Also generally, there's a best time to post. And again, you can study this up. I don't talk too much about this, but generally they say that there are certain days of the week at the time of the day when it would be most optimal to post. So if you post when your audience are not logged in, then what you post is going to go unnoticed and other things that are posted on the timeline come up and what you're posted goes way down on the timeline. So there is an optimal time that you can release content. And if you identify that for your audience, and now your audience online, what we pretend to post, so that when they are online, you post, you're more likely to see what you've posted. So that's a thing. And now some of our work, a lot of our online posts are automated. That means it's not like some physical person going and posting it. For example, like I mentioned, Sunday sermons, all that is all actually automated. There are scripts that have been written that actually keep pushing our content onto these social media platforms, all happening automatically. So things that happen every week, we have automated those posts onto our social media platforms so that it's not something manual. But other events that are happening differently week to week, somebody actually does those posts. We've automated a lot of those, so on. In addition to these posts, you can do paid promotions and advertising on social media platforms. So with a small amount of money, you can actually reach large numbers of people, it's very cost effective, and we do that. So on our Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, we do paid promotions of maybe our books, maybe Bible college admissions when we're taking in people, or certain events. We don't do promotions for everything, but on certain events, you would like to put in a little money and push it. I think this is very, very useful because you can reach hundreds of thousands of people for small amounts of money. So use that whenever you want. So even if you spend 5,000 Indian rupees or 10,000 or 20,000, you could reach lots of people and you can target them by demographics, by which part of the world they are in or the city they are in. You can target your ads so that you're making your event visible to your intended audience. The last two points is it's useful to measure results. Like you said, there are metrics we can look at our website. In a similar way, you can look at metrics for what's happening online. So YouTube analytics, Facebook analytics, insights on Facebook, these things are there, already available as part of the platform. Go and look at them, see what's happening. So we can see how many people are out. So every week, our team will send us a short update saying we have so many people watching, we have so many people viewing, etc. Real-time. So we are looking at it from so many different countries. So you can measure these results, you can see these results. And there are other monitoring tools also available. So there are insights available from within the platforms, but you can also look at it from outside some other monitoring tools that you could use. I think there was a question here. Let me see. Okay, so question. If you get hate comments from any of the advertisements, do we respond or ignore or hide it from them? Yeah, so generally, we hide. So for hate comments, we report it and we hide it. So we don't engage with hateful comments. There's no point. It just gets into non-humans. So we just report it, you flag it so that Facebook or whichever the platform is, they will handle it. And you hide it so you don't want others to see it. That's kind of how we respond to that. Yeah, okay. So social media is useful. But again, I don't know. I was just reading a recent article saying that Gen Z is actually moving back to reading physical books. So it's kind of like a trend that they're kind of tired of social media and there's a trend here to moving back to reading physical books and so on. That was just a recent research report that came out. I'm not saying every person is topping social media and moving this way. They're just finding that there is this shift back to reading books and coming back to those kinds of things, which is interesting. But to whatever extent we can reach and serve people online, we can make use of that. But I think people are finding social media just too cluttered to sometimes like John said pointed out very hateful and all kinds of things happening. Sometimes it becomes very destructive whereas when you're reading a book, you choose the book you want to read. You can read just that or the other advantages are there. So maybe there's a shift happening which we also need to be mindful about. Okay. So we're going to pause here for today. Next week, we're going to shift what we've been talking about. We're going to get into digital equipment. So I don't know if you'll like that, but we're going to talk about the equipment that we typically use for our work. The reason is, and you might find it strange, but the reason is if you're a pastor or if you're a leader for whatever reason, people in the church even to buying digital equipment, they come back to you. So I remember in those early days when we first started, we had, we got to buy, I had no idea about speakers and mics at zero. Hardly any knowledge. We had to go buy. I had to go buy the speakers and mix. I had no idea about these things. I just went to the shop and said, look, I want two speakers, I want three mics and how do I put it together? So I had to learn when you're starting a ministry. I had to learn how to buy. And then of course, as people started coming, we needed better equipment. And people would come and say, pastor, we need to buy, for example, I remember one of the people said, first we need to buy a snake cable. I had no idea what a snake cable was. What is that? So what is it? And then they explained, it is all these wires combined together and you have a long cable. And as like, okay, I wanted to do ministry and I didn't realize I had to make decisions about all these kinds of things. But it was a lot of learning. And then when you had video and camera and lots of these things. So I said, okay, maybe I don't need to know all the details. But eventually, because you're a leader, your media team, your audio team, these will come to you for making the final decision. You have to approve it. There are three options. Which one are you going to buy? So you need some understanding, some little understanding. You don't have to be an expert. Enough to have a conversation with your team to know what to buy, what camera to buy, why you're buying that. Why is this camera better than that? These kind of things, doing presentation, what software, why the software, why not that. So what I want to do is from the next class, we'll go through software and equipment for cameras, videos, audio, live streaming. So we kind of go through those things. And I'm not saying we should be experts on it. You don't need to be an expert. Just have enough information so that you can have a conversation with your team and tell them, yeah, this is what we will use. And a lot of this is always changing. You're getting better cameras, better things. So people come to me and say, we need to buy better cameras, we need to add another camera, etc. So you have to have discussion, we have to talk to them, ask them the right questions and then make the decision. So from that perspective, I will be sharing these things. So next week, we get into digital equipment, a little bit on the software and the hardware, both from cameras, video cameras, to audio equipment, live streaming equipment, what they're using. And just keep that in mind so that it might be useful for your church and your ministry. So we're close for today. Thank you for your patient listening. I hope these things are useful and hope you'll be able to make use of it in your church and your ministry. Somebody could close in prayer and we'll discuss. Dear Heavenly Father, I come to you under the name of Jesus. I thank you for this day. Thank you for everything that we learned today about we thank you for the technology. We thank you for the development that the world is going through and for you fill us with your knowledge, with your wisdom and guidance. So therefore we could use these tools for the edifying of the church, for building up your kingdom in a right way Jesus. And we thank you for everything that we learned. We thank you for Pastor Ashish help us to be equipped even in this way Jesus so that we can work mightily your kingdom. We can be salt and light to the nations and nations. Thank you. We give you all the glory in Jesus name and prayer. Thank you, Rowan. Enjoy the rest of your day. I'll see you tomorrow. God bless.