In my part-time job as Parish Webmaster, I tend to wear many hats. I’m blessed to work in a parish where our pastor and administration have recognized the profound opportunities presented by a strong online presence. As a result, they have budgeted for a staffer to create a consistent message via our parish website and social networking venues. With limited resources (and working eight hours per week), I tend to try to look at “what works” and am always experimenting with ways to garner more engagement in our community online.
Here are a few tips for things that have amped up participation on our parish Facebook page:
Build a Team
Our team includes myself (the Parish Webmaster), our Youth Minister, our Director of Hispanic Ministries and our middle school Religious Education Director. We each bring a unique perspective and all have access to the full set of tools on Facebook. Always keep your Pastor informed of your Facebook activities if he does not serve on your team.
Consider a Bilingual Presence
Our parish offers two Masses each weekend in Spanish. We are working on building up our Spanish language tools offered on the Facebook page to reflect and serve this part of our community.
Post Your Bulletin Content
As a wife and mom, I can tell you that I have rarely seen my young adult sons and husband glance at our parish bulletin (which is currently ten pages long each week). They do, however, visit our Facebook page regularly. They likely reflect a growing number of our parishioners who turn to their favorite social networking venue to find (and share) news and information from church. We post a link from the Facebook page to our bulletin online every Wednesday (before the weekend) – if I’m late posting that link, I do hear from parishioners who are waiting to read the bulletin online.
Study What Works
Facebook offers an increasingly robust set of statistics for pages. I check our statistics weekly, with an eye towards considering what types of posts increase engagement. Without a doubt, the most engaging posts on our Facebook page are photos. These afford the added benefit of helping our parishioners better know one another. One caveat: before posting photos be sure to examine and follow your parish and diocesan policies for sharing such information, especially if youth or students appear in photos.
Consider Promoting Posts
I have not done much in the way of using Facebook advertising. But I did recently run a parish survey and spent $5 of my own money to promote it. I was pleasantly surprised by the response – we had 73 people answer the survey and the data, while far from scientific, will help me determine what types of content to share on our page in the future.
What About Your Parish?
As we continue to venture into and test the waters with new tools for the New Evangelization, I encourage you to consider creating a strategy for your parish’s Facebook presence. Again, aim for engagement over numbers.
Lisa – good list!
Other simple advice:
1 – Post regularly. Content doesn’t have to be all original. If there is a great blog post or article you want to share, then share it.
2 – Know your audience. If you post something that gets a great reception then try to post similar items. If you only post what you like, then you won’t get very far.
Good stuff Lisa.
I love that you are talking about this. My question to you is what are your thoughts to the throttling of Facebook Pages with their audiences?
The best way to get people to get people to share and engage with your content is to be producing solid, shareable content. The adage that “Content is King” is especially true on Facebook.
Thanks for your comment Jeremy – it’s definitely a difficulty. I’m sorry that I don’t have a good answer for you at this point. Hopefully one of our other commenters may have ideas. I can say that I’ve occasionally sponsored posts with a very limited budget ($5) and have seen good engagement results on those. I try to carefully watch our numbers and am continually working on figuring out “what works”.
We use our Facebook page as a sort of parish news feed.
We remind our followers of weekly liturgical services, like novenas and rosaries; and other events, like fundraisers or blood drives. We also cross-post events from our parish school. This is especially useful, because our parish school does not have a Facebook page. We also posts links to each Sunday’s readings and recordings of our Sunday homilies.
I like the “pin to top” and “highlight” options, because we can make important posts more prominent.
Working in community journalism, I’ve come to learn that school parents LOVE to see pictures of their kids. So our Facebook page serves as a depository for photographs of events from our parish school, among other events.
Another thing that I began as an experiment last year was posting each day’s Mass intention to our Facebook and Twitter pages. This has become quite popular, especially for the relatives and friends of the person named. My goal is to bring that name or names to our social network so our followers may see it and, perhaps, pray on it.
Those are some great suggestions Michael! I love the posting of Mass intentions, such a great way to engage your Facebook community in prayer!
Great suggestions–I agree that posting Mass intentions is a great idea. We find a lot of success sharing photos, as Michael also mentioned, and with any posts related to our parish school.
We tend to post links to articles from our e-newsletters or do posts based on bulletin articles (rather than linking to the full PDF), and that way we’re able to share a lot of content spread throughout the week. My question is, how many posts is too many (on Facebook and Twitter)? I’ve heard different schools of thought on this and am curious about your opinion. We tend to have 1-2 on Facebook and 1-3 on Twitter daily. (Thank you, Hootsuite!)
Also, any types of posts/content that generate more than a simple “Like”? Getting parishioners to comment/retweet is the next frontier for us.
Thanks for the input!
Nicole -
Different people will tell you different things, but I tend to go with 1-2 posts on Facebook per day and 5-10 posts on Twitter. And definitely all done via an app like HootSuite. How do you get that much content? Start sharing other great Catholic content you find on the web.
To get more than a like, make sure your posts are asking open ended questions that are really looking for feedback.
Hope that helps!