Well, I want to welcome everyone. I am Phil Lund, Congregational Life Consultant, with the MidAmerica Region [of the Unitarian Universalist Association]. And this is a webinar on using social media for small congregations. And we're going to talk specifically about Facebook tonight. My interest in doing this webinar has come from working with small congregations around the MidAmerica Region. And I noticed that some of our congregations are the only congregation within, like, a six county region, you know, like right in the center of multiple counties around them. And I was just, you know, what's the best way to reach people beyond your immediate area. And I started looking into using Facebook to do that. Now, ultimately, what I found about that is a later webinar, because it's about using Facebook ads. But I wanted to just start with the basics for this webinar, and hopefully ended up giving you a social media calendar that I think will do what we want to be able to do with Facebook. And it'd be really, really simple to use. Okay, so that's the plan. When I realized I wanted to offer something on Facebook, I did, what I often do is when looking around on the internet, looking for what people had to say about how small congregations can use Facebook, and I found ...

Oh, I'm not getting my advancing on this. There we go. I found a blog post from somebody named Amiee Cottle. And I can get you all links for this stuff as because you all registered, I can send you an email that will have all the links for the things I talked about. Plus I'll even make a PDF of the slides. So you can have those. Okay, that sounds good. Sounds wonderful to me. So, alright, so I found this blog post by someone named Amiee Cottle. {https://get.tithe.ly/blog/aimee-cottle] And it was called three social media tips for small churches, and I thought, three tips. That's great. That's a great place to start. Three tips and the tips were pretty simple. Pick one platform, pick one platform, decide why you're there. Why are you even on social media, and then know your audience. Okay. So those were the three things that Amiee Cottle talked about. And the very first one was pick one platform. And this one was a pretty obvious one to do. They said pick Facebook, Facebook was their top recommendation for small churches. And the reason was that as they say, there's over 2 billion people on Facebook. And based on recent research, those people are spending between 25 and 40 minutes there every day. And choosing Facebook as your platform will give you access to the most people and the most options for connecting with them. Now I know Facebook is going through a bit of a rough time right now. Senate investigations and exposes in newspapers, and Facebook is probably not living up to their highest ideals. But I think the motivation behind Facebook connecting people is still there and still valid and it's still remains one of the best ways to do that. I also think that for religious organizations, for religious communities, it's kind of our obligation to use Facebook well and try not to get into all of the, you know, the the worst aspects of Facebook. And really promote it and promote using it in a way that is positive and that shares progressive values and, and things like that. So their top recommendation was use Facebook, which I totally agree with and I probably would have gotten there anyway. So would you use Facebook though? You have some options and I can't see you all right now but you know, you can go ahead and wave your hands around this, but for organizations, businesses, congregations, religious institutions, there are multiple things you can do with Facebook. And the first one is have a page. Okay, so how many people have a Facebook page right now for their congregation? Yeah, I thought you might. So that's going to be what we talk about. If you don't, I'm happy to help you with that. But that is the first thing is to get a Facebook page. And your page is your welcome mat. They say in this blog post, it's a place where people will stumble upon you. And it says, focus on creating simple, inspirational content. Okay, I mean, and that's, to me, the positive reason to be on Facebook, right, is to be putting out things that are simple and positive and inspirational. And I would say things that share our values. And we'll talk a little bit more about that later. Now, the second thing is Facebook groups and and how many people have a group then attached to their, yeah, page, okay, so you start with a page. And then you can make a group based on that page. And they say that the group is your living room. Facebook groups are where the people already connected to your church, your congregation, your fellowship, can connect with each other, meet new people and dive deeper into their faith. So you've got your welcome map, and you have your living room pages or welcome mat. Groups is your living room. I kind of think like pages can be like,

more than your welcome mat, but just kind of your narthex or whatever. That little area in your church when people -- your building when people first come in, and they start to find out about you. It might be because of what you have on the the walls, it might be because of your greeters, you know, but this is where they're beginning to find out about you. The Groups is where like they say, the living room, that more deeper things can happen. And people can get to know each other better. We're going to be focusing on Pages this evening, because we want to get to that social media calendar. But just know that there are some various things you can do with Facebook. Checking the chat... um, yeah, okay. So I think I mentioned what I was saying about using Facebook, I think that it's it we, I'm reading the, the chat here, I think we can we can use it in a way that is sharing our values, and it is putting good content out there and is hopefully doing what we want to do in general inside and outside of Facebook, which is make the world a better place. Surprisingly, about young adults, a surprisingly large number of adults still use Facebook, too. So I think one reason is that it's a good place to start. And I'll get to that in a moment because it's about the ages of people in the UUA. But, um, Okay, I gotta get out of here for a second and turn the chat off. Okay, because of the, our average age, our median age, we, we are kind of slightly collectively slightly older than the average Facebook user. Okay. So it kind of fits our demographics in some ways, but younger people are still using it. So it's not that it's a place that does not reach young adults at all. Okay, so let's look a little. Let's look at the second question, then is to decide or the second thing to do, is decide why you're there. Why are you on social media? They say, what kind of tool do you want social media to be for your church? How do you want your congregation and people in your community to engage with it? And like I said, I think one of the number one reasons to be using Facebook is to be sharing UU values and what I think about some of those congregations that are in rural areas where there isn't a whole lot of there aren't a whole lot of people or organizations visibly sharing progressive values. Facebook can do that in those areas. So I think for me, that's a big reason why to be on Facebook to let people know in their community, that there are folks out there who

there are folks out there who have progressive values. So I think that's one of the reasons to be on Facebook. So decide while why you were there. And as I said before, one of the big reasons I think we should be there is sharing our UU values. So here's some wording of the seven principles that comes from the UU welcome video. And you can see that there's actually eight on there. Now, because I'm including the eighth principle, that's a proposed eighth principle, but... believing of the worthiness of every person, showing compassion and fairness, accepting others for who they are, growing through a personal search for truth, leading with democratic spirit, working for justice. And understanding that everything is interconnected, and then also working to build a diverse multicultural beloved community. So these are the values that UU congregations can be expressing on Facebook. And as I said, these may not be the values that people are seeing or hearing, not only on Facebook, but in their communities. So I think it's almost our obligation to be promoting our values in a way that people can actually see them and hear them. And we'll be talking more about how you can do that okay.

There, okay, so the next thing is, know your audience. And the way this blog posts put it that I think is worth thinking about is, think about your audience's individual people, not a massive group. Okay, so who are the individuals that we're trying to reach in our communities? Okay, who are they? And then also, what are the struggles? What struggles do they have? And what does your church have to offer them to help them through their challenges? That's part of our reason, why are we on Facebook? Why are we doing social media? Why do we even want to share our values? Well, it's, do we have something to offer them? And so think about that, as you imagine what your audience is, who they are? And then how are you going to share that with them. So thinking about who you're trying to reach on social media will help you serve them in a real intangible way. Okay. And so again, when I think about it, I, you know, we always hear about the stories of people who come to a UU church and and say, Where have you been my whole life? You know, I've been a UU and I never knew it, you know, until I came here and found you all. Okay, well, you know, church decl-- attendance is in decline, fewer and fewer people are actually members of churches, I think fewer and fewer people will be looking for churches. So we actually have to go out and be telling people who we are and what we have to offer, before they may even find us or stumble across us. So knowing who they are and what we want to offer them. I think it's an important thing. I agree with that. Totally. Okay, so there's-- I shared those with you already.

Now, I wanted to share a little bit more about who we are. And this comes from the Public Religion Research Institute [https://www.prri.org/] did a poll recently. And they looked at the American religious landscape in 2020. They just published this last year, or this year [2021] in July. And as you can see there, there's a list of all the religious groups that they got answers about. They just ask people, you know, what religion do you identify with? Okay, the largest number is the unaffiliated. Those are the people who may not be looking for a church at all, right? They're -- they probably will not be stopping by churches to see what's going on. They might be, we might be able to reach them by what we do, what we promote, how we share our values, but for the most part, they're not looking for congregations. But you can see that the white evangelical Protestants and the white mainline Protestants and the white Catholics are the majority. And as you move down, the groups get smaller and smaller and smaller, until you reach the smallest group that they got an answer for, which was people who said they were Unitarian Universalist, and that is only point 2% of the people who did the survey. So when thinking about who we are, we are a very, very small group. Okay. 

Next. We are an older group too, when you -- when they looked at the median ages of religious groups, those white evangelical Protestants and those white Catholics were the older, oldest that-- then Unitarian Universalists right along there with it. So our median age is 53. And we are also -- and this has been going on for some time, we are likely to have a higher education level. This is -- down at the bottom is actually the ones that have the people most likely to have college and postgraduate degrees. And it's Jewish Americans, Unitarian, Universalist, and Hindus. Okay. And I just mentioned this thing, this, when we think about who we are trying to reach. When if we were going to talk about Facebook ads, Facebook ad has, has a mirror audience option, where they will send the ads to people who pretty much look like the people who are already interacting with you. And I think that's a good place to start, is if we acknowledge who we are in general and what people and how people may perceive us. We're not just trying to reach that group exclusively. But we have to understand that that, is probably the group of people that may be responding positively to us reaching out to them. So just being aware of that and acknowledging that, knowing who we are helps us have some idea of who we're reaching out to. Okay. So now, let me see, where are we? Okay, good.

So now, I'd like to get to how to build a social media calendar, using a simple social media calendar using some very good ideas that I that I found on online. This one comes from a group called Pro Church Tools [https://prochurchtools.com/]. And it's -- some folks who are just keeping track how of how congregations are using social media. And so what they did is they tracked six churches and their pastors who were doing an amazing job on social media. And what they wanted to do was just learn what was working. Okay, so for 21 days, this group recorded every single thing these churches published on their circle, social media, media, and they work their way through those, you know, 1000-plus social media posts, looking for trends and patterns. And what made those churches so excellent on the social media, with social media that they were using. And what they found out is that they followed something called -- well, it wasn't a rule, but they identified it as the rule -- which was the one in five rule. And the one in five rule is, you should only have one promotional item for every five posts you put up. Right? So if you post five times a week, only one post should actually be promoting your church. So that's the one in five rule. And personally, I, I thought that was kind of refreshing. Because what it means is, if we just want to, if we want to promote our Sunday morning service, if that's the thing we're going to be promoting every week, then we should only be doing four Facebook posts that week. And already right there. It, to me, it makes the social media calendar a little easier to handle when you think that less is more in this regard. You know, you're not flooding it with a lot of posts, and then throwing a promotional post in there. You're actually balancing your promotional post with your other posts, right. So, I thought this was a very hopeful sort of rule for small congregations because what it means is if you're focusing on Facebook, in your social media, and that you're following the one in five rule, then you're only looking for at the most five posts a week. Okay, and that might even be too much. Because in another blog post I found this came from SocialSprout.com

What they said, at SocialSprout.com, is what they said when you're starting out -- and I think this even goes beyond starting out -- you should only be posting two to four times per week on your Facebook page. So that you know, it makes it a very doable sort of thing for a small congregation. If you're only posting two to four times per week on your Facebook page, and one of your posts is your promotional post, that means that your one other post, or your two other posts or your three other posts or at the most your four other posts are content that is available for other things. And I'm -- hopefully we'll find ways to make those other posts pretty easy for you to do. So some examples of some promotional posts. And now that's that's an entire, that would be another workshop too, because one of the things they talk about is stopping the scroll, you know, people are scrolling through social media and your posts need to jump out at them some way. So there's a whole kind of way about designing posts that will get people to look at them. But promotional posts is that post that's letting people know what you're doing on Sunday morning. Okay? It's really that simple. It's like join us on Sunday at whatever o'clock wherever o'clock, you know, whatever time, whatever location, online, whatever it might be for this program, right now. And we'll look at non promotional posts in a moment. So for now, those can be pretty simple. You know, I look at what small congregations put up. And it's usually the same thing every Sunday, you know, or promoting their Sunday services, it's usually the same thing. And I think you can start simply that way, if you're not doing those posts. If you are, we can look at some other examples of how, how we can jazz those up a little bit. And again, the idea is to be able to do this without having to hire a social media expert, or without having to overburden your volunteers to just keep it as simple as possible, but as interesting and compelling as possible to write. So I think that's another another webinar. Marlene, I see you have your hand up there.

Yeah, I just want to clarify. Right now you're talking about pages, not groups. Correct.

Right? Pages, people just like them, and then they see your stuff. When it comes up. Groups, somebody has to let you in. And groups can be hidden, you know, like, you can't even find them, private groups. And I would suggest that groups do be somewhat private and hidden. Because that's where you're going to be a little more intimate with each other. You know, that'd be a little bit more like the parking lot and not just gathering in the, you know, just the kind of the conversations will be more like that. So. So, good question. Thank you. And Annie.

I think they go, I don't really think it was necessary to make them hidden. Nobody can get into it and see anything as long as it's private. And then if it's been if it's not hidden, somebody actually wants to look for you, they may be able to find it.

That's good. So yeah, yeah. Yeah, I know, I find some groups, you know, that aren't secret groups, you know, you can find them. And then if you want to get into it, you can [ask to] join it. My concern is if people find it, and a church gets sloppy, and just starts letting everybody in, you know, this is a, this is a place where you really need to say, I know this person. And that's why I didn't talk too much about groups. But I know this person, we know this person, they're already, you know, involved with us, they can be part of the group. But if you're just kind of letting anybody and well, you know, you can let a Russian troll in, and that's not really what you want to do. So, yeah. So okay, a good point, though. Good point.

So Karen asked for some examples of non promotional posts. And that's what I want to do right now is just run through all the places I think that you can get content without having to develop them yourself, that you can share, that will express UU values, okay. And I'll I'll do the slides and then maybe we'll look at some of these pages. And you can see the kinds of things we're talking about. Okay. Okay, so the very first place is the UUA, the UUA has a Facebook page that you can get content from, and you can share it. Now, one thing I will say about the UUA Facebook page is it often is using content from other UU related groups, right. So you might see the same content on the UUA Facebook page that you might see in some of these other groups. So you know, you'll want to just keep an eye out for that. But what this means is that you need to be following these groups on Facebook, okay. Now there is another UUA resource is when they have a press release, and you can share those on your Facebook page. And you may recall, you might have seen them, President Susan Frederick Gray had several videos that she put out, kind of pastoral sort of things. That, I think would have been great to share, because they really gave some insight into who we are as an organization and sharing, you know, our, what our leader is saying, our elected leader's saying, and that can really give people a sense of who we are as Unitarian Universalists. And that's one of the reasons that I'm suggesting that these are the kinds of places that we share things from. I'll show you one of these when we get there. Beacon Broadside, comes from Beacon Press, and they have a lot of posts every month, six or seven posts a month, that have to do with Beacon authors. And as you know, Beacon Press is owned by the Unitarian Universalist Association, and what they publish, the books they publish our books that are very much in line with the values of Unitarian Universalism. So they're very interesting reads, these Beacon Broadsides. And I think they would make great content to put up on our Facebook pages. One of the greatest thing that's come a long recently in the last few years are the Braver/Wiser meditations, and we'll take a look at it. And once I've gone through these, they're very short little pieces, inspirational pieces, this is something people have been asking for for ages is, you know, why doesn't the UUA have have like a weekly message that they put out there that, you know, is inspirational and, and they do. It's called Braver/Wiser. And there are two ways to get it, you can go to the UUA. website directly and get it or they also have a Facebook page for themselves that you can share. Okay.

See, I mentioned the press releases and the statements already, so you can get those directly. There are some UU adjacent groups like the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, that has a Facebook page that often talks about the work that they're doing, and the work that they're doing is often in line with our values. So again, by sharing this information is a way to share with others, you know, who Unitarian Universalists are what we value and what we do. Now, this may not be specifically about your congregation. But remember, it's just helping people get a sense of who we are, and those values. And by the way, I know I'm talking about filling up your your Facebook feed with sharing things like this, but you can certainly create your own content that's specific to your congregation and fit that into this social media calendar as well. But if you were going to do the five to one thing, okay, we have to come up with our own promotional posts for Sunday morning. And then we have to come up with five for other posts during the week. Well, that's that's a lot of creation of social media content. So this stuff is there for us to really use and, and make something out of it. So another one is Skinner House. We'll take a look at that too. They oftentimes are promoting their Skinner House books, but other times they'll have excerpts from those books. They'll have meditations or readings or poems in a Facebook post. And again, those make excellent social media content to share with people. So they have some idea who we are. Side With Love, again, is a bit like the UU Service Committee where they're sharing posts about the things that they're doing, and those things that they're doing are in line with our values. So sharing things from Side With Love can be very -- I don't know, it can be exciting actually. Because oftentimes there's some promoting things that we might not think to promote. If you subscribe to Soul Matters, you may already know this, but Soul Matters sharing circle has a Facebook page where they put plenty of attractive posts up there, that, on their page, that you could be sharing on your page. And Touchstones, which is another service for thematic material to use in your church on a monthly basis. They actually have a media page where they will supply you with posts, some images that you can put up there for posts on your website, as well. But you're saying, so you found a relatively new newsfeed. Yeah, what what is it?

It's on the page? Uh huh. On our page. Most all, it all that's there is our posts. So, but on the left hand side, there is a set of things and one of them says news feed. And if you click on that, UU congregation's posts from all over the place. That's what local churches posts. So interesting. You can find all kinds of things there is.

So that's on your congregations, you've got that set up on your congregations web page.? All right.

No, it's no, it's on the Facebook page. Oh, this Yeah. Okay. Admin. Okay, if you're an admin, you can find it. Okay.

If you're the admin, if you're the one who's responsible for putting up posts,

so you might... Okay, well, that's interesting to know. So by seeing those, you might find some other posts to share by that newsfeed. Okay. Good point. Okay. So if you're the administrator for your Facebook page, you can have access to this newsfeed that will show you what other congregations are putting out their local things and stuff like that. And then you can choose some of that content to share. That's great. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. All right.

So now I'm going to share my screen again, Facebook does have "keeping your community of faith connected" in their Facebook blueprint kind of learning area, and they have some little lessons that you can do here. That can just help you with these Facebook posts and everything like that. So that's something worth taking a look at. So let's just grab a few things here. Here are the Braver/Wiser posts. I'm curious how many people have seen the Braver/Wiser stuff? Few people? Yeah. Yeah, I really think it's great content. For us as Unitarian Universalists, what they do is every, every week, they have a new post. That is basically something about as long as a little story type thing you would find in one of our meditation manuals from the past, they're very high quality, they're always you know, very personal in nature. They're well written, they are inspirational. And that comes out every month, so or every week. And I would definitely call them a weekly message of courage and compassion. If I were the social media person for a small congregation, I would make sure we had one of these up every week, because it is one of the nicest, one of the best things we have. And they also have a huge back catalogue of them. They have a whole archives. So you might be able to find some content about some specific issues that you might want to put up there. Some themes, you know, so art, music spirit. See what's -- I feel like I'm rolling a dice there. There we go. So here's some stuff about singing and dancing and right. So playlists of the spirit, so this Braver/Wwiser posts, they're just a great, a great resource for us. And there's a lot up there now, but it is also very contemporary. As you can see, there was one for this week, October 20. Last week, October 13, October 6, so it's amazing. And yeah, See, I hear my computer, it's telling me you had your hand up there, what's up?

I do. Because to me that I may want to try going into this resource and picking things that are related to the sermon, that's going to be the following Sunday, then post them during that week, and then post sermon information for the week. Yeah, that's thinking about the sermon, and then through the sermon,

that's, that is a great idea. Especially because, you know, you can always make a little comment when you share it at the top. And you can say, "I'm sharing this Braver/Wiser post, because our upcoming sermon is going to be on ___ blank." And this piece, you know, maybe think about or whatever, you know, but so that I was going to say you can just post these things without comment, or you can personalize them to or localize them, as they would say, in the news. You know, you could, you could say something about it, why you at your congregation thinks this is important to share.

Okay, so that's something that that the people who have permissions to do those things on your page can do. And we don't have time to get into it tonight. But there are various levels of responsibility you can assign to people for the page, you know, and that's part of social media strategy, too.

You know, that's a good question, Margaret. I was I'm not going to talk about Instagram, but they could very well be on Instagram. So that's we're taking a look forward to see if they are and Judy saying she hasn't used them on Instagram. But adding thoughts to personalize them too. That's great, Judy. I was I was gonna say that Instagram is owned by Facebook. And it's actually the next logical social media site to work with platform to work with because they are connected. So think about that, too. If you start with Facebook, if you're on Facebook, now, you start to follow a social media calendar to five to one rule. You share a lot of content from the year you were you personalize it with a little something before you share it. You're doing your promotions, and you want to expand. I think Instagram would would be the place to go to.

Yeah, Marlene, Soul Matters has a social media toolkit. Repo-- and posting things that are going on in your community to like an Indigenous art show or solar energy workshop? Yes, definitely. And those are things that kind of share UU values again. So I mentioned the Touchstone thing. I kind of ran into this, looking at their outreach strategies if you do subscribe to Touchstone, they do have a social media plan too. somebody mentioned that Soul Matters has one. Touchtone has one as well. So if you subscribe to either of these monthly theme resources, they both have social media plans that go with them. So I think that would be very helpful. Marlene, I see you had your hand up.

Yeah, I just double checked. So if you open Braver/Wiser and you open it, you click on it and open in your browser, you have at least-- I'm on an iPad, you least have the option to when you hit the Share icon. The the option of sharing it with Instagram comes up when you hit that icon so you can share directly to your--

Okay, excellent, right. So if you start doing it, but you can't do it, that's great. Thank you for checking on that. Right. So if you start -- if you're using Facebook and move into Instagram, you may find some of these resources you can share on Instagram as well. And, and that's just kind of doubling up. I think that's a great idea to do that. Thank you for checking on that, Marlene.

So let me just pop back on to social to my my screen again. Let me just show you a few other things that I found. Here was the UUA press room. Nothing new has come up here for a while but oftentimes you will find like here on September 11. On the anniversary, September 11. Susan Frederick Gray had a message, right. And that is something that we could be sharing. And like I said that lets people know who we are. As an association. You can also share it with a little comment too. And so going directly to the press room, I think just keeping an eye on it. As you can see, it's not a weekly thing. But when something does come up, you'll want to you'll want to really seriously consider putting up putting it up there because they do definitely kind of give people a sense of who we are collectively as Unitarian Universalists. ...okay, and Lance says if you're looking for content, Creative Commons is a great place to look for copyright free content. So that's at Creativecommons.org. Thank you. If people share links like that, I'll make sure they're in the the letter I send out.

So here's an example of the Beacon Broadsides. I wanted to show that to you. Okay. This one is kind of a promoting Beacon holiday, October is the new December. So start your holiday book counting now. But they're promoting Beacon Press titles, which is fine. You know, I think that's great. But let's see October, there were seven posts in October. And often these are about peep -- These are interactions, interviews, posts, small essays, whatever from people who have -- here's a q&a -- people who have written books that were published by Beacon Press or are, you know, promoting the same sort of things. So here's here's a nice one, a q&a With WJ Huber through radical empathy, perhaps we can save what's left of life on our planet. Here's behind the books, somebody who works for Beacon Press, you know, so here's a place where you might find some content, basically, is really what I think is important. Here's the Soul Matters feed, easy to share. They have a lot of this stuff, you don't have to be subscribed to Soul Matters to share it. You just need to understand that it's going to be on a specific theme. You know, for the whole month, you're going to keep seeing posts on those themes. But again, I think they're they're, they're great looking. They're really well done. It's definitely worth looking at Soul Matters. I want to get back to the my -- Oh, right. And then Lois. Yes. The UU Hysterical Society, and Facebook has some fun posts, I saw you were promoting their service they're doing in two days or whatever about -- do you have the link for that? Can you find the link and put it in the chat? You shared that in your in the email. Yeah. And people might want to take a look at it. They're actually doing a kind of a fun service about social media. So maybe all, some of you might want to check that out. Just for fun. They're really dedicated to being light hearted and you know, mirth and dignity. Yeah, like inherent worth and dignity. That's great. So they're very good. They're very funny. So yes,

They also have some very poignant stuff sometimes.

Yeah, they I'm sure they do. And that's the point. Yeah, yeah. Right, you know, is that you can, you can have mirth and dignity, and you can have very poignant stuff as well. So let me get back to the slideshow there real quick. And there was one other thing I wanted to show you, where'd that slideshow go. There it went.

So, as I said, putting together a social media calendar, this is often the place where groups get overwhelmed. Because the traditional way of doing a social media calendar is kind of you know, sitting down, looking at the whole month, deciding what you're going to post on which social media platform, you know, you can use a scheduling thing where you can set it all up ahead of time. And small congregations just don't have the time and energy to do that. So keeping it simple, I think is a priority. So we start with this idea that Facebook posts can be two to four times a week is is perfectly fine to be only posting that much but remembering that maybe a maximum of five times a week because if we're only going to do that one promotional post a week, we don't want to be hidden, buried under a bunch of other posts. So we want to limit our posts to four to one, right? So if you're going to be, you know, we've got a lot of stuff to share from now you know Soul Matters and Beacon Broadsides and Braver/Wiser and some of the stuff from Side With Love and the UUSC, there's just -- you're gonna have a lot of content to share. So you're going to have to start to choose, right? So that will be the most difficult thing there, is which two to four posts are you going to put up in addition to your promotional posts, okay? That for me, the question always is, when when is the best time to do this? So I found this on that SocialSprout group they found that Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday, are the days that have the highest engagement. This is globally on Facebook, but have the highest engagement. Okay. And, you know, we've got the days of the week running down the left hand side, and we have the time on the bottom. And you can see pretty much around the middle of the day is the highest time for engagement. I don't know what that says about what people are doing when they should be working, maybe but you know, they're spending time on Facebook. And that is a time when their honor. So right there, let's say if you were only doing three posts a week, okay, posting something on Tuesday posting something on Wednesday, and posting your promotional post on Friday would be your basic social media plan. And it's a plan, you know, you can also measure it, you can say, well, how many people are responding to these things? Are we getting more people interested in our services on Sunday, because we're promoting them on Friday like that. But you know, think about when you're actually going to promote them. And I think that's the -- I was really pleased to see this, our administrator in MidAmerica Region, he's got an optimal time calculator for when we send out emails and posts and things like that. But we don't need to actually get something like that when we have this information here. So you can also see though, to an optimal time, every day of the week is right around what 11am, Monday through Friday, you know, so if you want to do five days a week, it's telling you what time is probably the best time to put that post out there. So as I said, keeping it simple, which is start with sharing posts from the UUA, or UU related Facebook groups, and just share them right off of Facebook. That's the absolutely easiest thing to do.

And I think when you take the five to one rule in mind with that, that we could all in our small, even the smallest congregation can have a plan, you know, a plan that is designed to share our UU values, and to let people in our community know who we are. Now, the other side of this coin, I don't know if it's a coin, but this-- people need to like our pages. So I did see somewhere where someone was suggesting that you just promote liking your page. Often, they were saying every Sunday, you know, you might want to say if you found us on Facebook, please like us, and then you can keep track of what's going on. You know, you just keep mentioning that, because you need people coming to the page to see what's happening. Right? And the important people to get liking your page are your own congregants, right. And it's almost like inviting people to church. But you know, have you ever gotten a little message from Facebook that so and so wants you to like a page, you know, they can be actually asking people to like the page too. I mean, you can be, you know, out there sharing our UU values. And so I have to say, I don't have a personal social media plan, but I feel like I should and it would contain a lot of this sort of stuff-- is just looking through those UU things and sharing the ones that are really speaking to me. And I'm I'm doing that, you know, just because of the some of the people I have in my Facebook sphere, and I'm talking about my relatives, you know, who may be a little bit more conservative than I am. And I want to be able to share with them some positive things about Unitarian Universalism, you know, so these are the resources I would be using, especially the Braver/Wiser stuff, the Side With Love stuff, you know, just stuff that's letting them know what we as Unitarian Universalists, you know, believe in, the kind of things that we engage with.

So let's have some more questions and answers if folks are interested. And I'm curious too, if you just want to, you know, say how things are going with Facebook at your congregation. That's great, Lance, I see you put your hand up. And then Annie, I see you have your hand up Lance.

Well thanks for that. Phil, that was great. There's a lot of great references in there to use. I was curious about what's the current wisdom or is anyone who have good active Facebook pages using any kind of digital offertory?

Great question. So Lance is asking you are you using Facebook for Some sort of digital offertory type thing. I know some folks are. Because anybody here. So you're thinking about like the donate page? Or the donate button you might have. Yeah, yeah. Now, that's an interesting idea. I'm not sure, I will say, something I'm going to suggest in the future. And I would do another webinar around this is, if we're asking people to get to know us via Facebook, by looking at our posts, maybe we should be live streaming some of our worship, so that they can join us for them on Facebook still, you know, we can also be having it on Zoom, or YouTube, perhaps whatever else you're doing, but I would seriously consider having them on Facebook as well. And then I'm wondering, then, Lance, if you could have the donation thing as part of that as well.

Yeah, I don't know. I haven't looked into that yet. But it's, it's a good notion to do the Facebook Live things.

Yes. Yeah, yeah. And so I just began to look into that, and I, and, you know, for small congregations, again, I would want to find a way to make it as easy as possible. But, you know, it just, it just occurred to me, you know, like, if somebody is getting to know us by looking at our posts, and, and following it, following opening those links up and reading, Braver/Wiser, and, you know, maybe they want to stop by and visit us virtually sometime. And I don't know if any of you all remember this. But you know, it takes a lot of courage to actually go someplace, with a bunch of people that you don't know, the first time you go to church, you just don't know what's going to happen, right? If people can just kind of see your service on Facebook, they're going to get to know you a little bit better. And who knows, maybe they'll only join us virtually, but maybe they'll actually come through our doors at some point, too. But it's a way for them to get a get to know us, you know, and and one thing that small congregations certainly have going for them is their authentic, What You See Is What You Get, right? So you know, if your Sunday service is what's feeding your souls, then you know, share it with folks. And maybe some folks will find that it feeds their souls too.

Marlene, I see your hand up. Annie, you put yours down? Are you no longer--

I want to riff on groups, which we haven't really gotten into here. But we have an academy west of Indianapolis, which is the Annapolis I think between three and 4 million people now and several suburban bedroom communities. Each one has multiple chatter groups. There's an Allies for Racial Justice, there's a Nasty Women of Hendricks County that I mean, there's all kinds of groups I am taking, I have been able to get my page to join some of those groups. So after I posted my page, I then post all those groups of pages, as attached is a member of and then I go to my personal account, and I post from my personal account to the rest of that I'm posting to 17 different Facebook groups with a total membership ignoring overlap of about 80,000 people.

Yeah, there you go. Yeah.

You can really do a lot with Facebook with Groups.

Yeah. Excellent. Okay,

You don't need to know much about the groups but but you can do you can share. And one of the nice things is if you screw up your original post, and you pass it on all these groups, when you fix it, it fixes it everywhere.

You can fix it one place, and it'll fix it everywhere else. Okay, that's a good way to amplify. Excellent. Thank you. So Marlene, yeah. Yeah,

The one caveat I would make for particularly small congregations, moving to live streaming, even on Facebook, is that you enter a whole new realm of copyright issues. Because you're broadcasting and so you have to get permission for everything, every piece of music. For small congregation that's a huge, a huge stretch sometimes. So you're not just doing it to your own folks on Zoom. You. It complicates matters.

Yeah. Thank you for bringing, yeah,

Even if you're doing it on Zoom for your own congregation. If you're not just using hymns, you're still violating copyright.

It it's grayer, it's a grayer zone.

But if not, if you're on Facebook,

yeah, technically you are in violation of copyright.

If you are on Facebook and, Yes, they I've heard of congregations actually having their service stop because the Facebook algorithm algorithm thought they were using something that they -- and they paid for the rights and the royalties and everything. So when we talk about live streaming for small congregations, which I want to do some point, I think it would, would definitely require taking what you're saying into consideration, Marlene and saying, Okay, let's say you only do half your service, right? Let's say you only stream part of your service. So you make sure that whatever you are doing in that window, you know, is not breaking any copyright rules, you know? So, but you're right, if you put your whole service up, and you're singing some song that you may, even if you have the rights for it, Facebook might say, No, that's a copyright violation.

Like there's a really good piece on worship web about. Yeah, streaming and copyright. Yeah, really good piece. Yeah.

But, um, that's for a future thing. These are good points. But this is, you know, this stuff we can all share without worrying about, you know, our Facebook posts, we can share without worrying about breaking copyrights or anything like that. So, um, so what do you all think? I mean, does this sound like what you're doing? Or, you know, have people done it, people have some plans that they, you know, they worked something out that they think they they're doing something could be helpful? Does anybody have something like that? To share? I mean, we heard we saw a few things in the comments, some people make sure to share local events that are like, consistent with our values. And I totally agree with that. You know, I'm not saying that everything you share needs to be UU oriented. I will say, I am a little disheartened when I see a small congregation that everything they share is not UU related or oriented, you know, they'll just like share everything from all sorts of places, and they don't seem to be sharing from any you use places, you know. So I think it's okay to mix it up. But um, I like erring in the favor of sharing UU stuff. Karen, see your hand...

thank you, I find that the posts that get the most likes that people click on liking the posts are usually like personal things. It's like highlighting a member who was in the news recently.

Excellent.

I don't know how that fits into the strategy, though.

It does. I would say, you probably don't have four members being highlighted in the news every week. So you could just be sharing about your members, right? So but when you do, that's a perfect kind of thing to put into the mix, right? When you have a local thing like that a communit-- your particular religious community related thing. You know, a congregation in Owensboro is doing something called Faith Fest, Kentucky, you know, and it's a two week thing. So this is going to have lots of news about that, right? You know, so just promoting your your members when they're doing something when they're in the news, I think that's a great idea too.

And, and we're not going to talk about ads. Now, we certainly don't have time, but ads is the next thing to be adding to this. And again, that's something you can use very sparingly. I've heard somebody say that churches should like only run three ads a year with Facebook. And they should be for events that are so big. And they call them bridge events, events that are designed to reach out to the community beyond your Sunday morning kind of content, and invite people to those events, right. And it could be virtual, that could be hopefully more in the future face to face. And so those would be ones where you'd even want to reach to a wider audience. And so those are very, you know, your congregation specific kinds of events. But that's that's another webinar, I think. Oh, Laticia.

I'm actually just curious as to whether anyone has done some evaluation of what they're doing on Facebook, as a congregation casino, they're just, it does require a lot of effort and time by the administrators and so on. And so I was discouraged, isn't there at these plans for evaluation by the members or some kind of reaction as to is it worth all this effort? Because I know with us, we have, you know, we have our website. So this is a good source of information for our members anyway. And we have email to plan members who have signaled interest in our programs, and so on. And then of course we have. So I guess those are the main things, big sources. And then of course, we have a Facebook site that one of our members put a lot of effort in. So I'm just curious about evaluation.

That's good question. That one, that one post I mention. Pick one platform, decide while you're there. They had they they did, or that was Amy, I think was her name. She did mention metrics, you know, trying to see what your results are. So she had things like, how many times? Did we share our values with people? Right? So you looked at your posts, and you could say, you know, just from your internal perspective, how many times that we put something out that was intentionally sharing our values? How many conversations did we have or initiate this week? So is anybody responding? You know, is anybody commenting, and again, to I'll say, if you're going to be having people respond back, they need to be responding, you know, with compassion and care and love, you know? So you want to you want to make sure that the people who are engaged with the Facebook paid page are the ones or people who can? Who can work with, with with responding to people on Facebook, and I've been looking at things, you know, we don't necessarily get a lot of comments on these things. So, you know, it's just something to look for. And then did we paint a better picture of what it's like to be part of this religious community? You know, so you're doing some kind of internal assessing of how things are going. But I would say, you know, what, we're really looking for it to be honest to seeing if anybody will engage with us on our main services. And that's really, you know, that's a question to ask, you know, I mean, how did you find us? Did you find us on Facebook or whatever like that. And if we do some of those bridging events, or those Bridge Events, the larger events where we may even have an ad is, you know, just finding out how many people do we reach how many people came because of Facebook? But that's a good question. And that's, that's something to think about, you know, is how do we assess whether this is working for us or not?

I think there's working in different levels. So we're working pretty well, and getting new likes and followers on our Facebook page. Great. I'm not doing very well at all, and getting those people to come in I mean, come in and actually come to our zoom service. Right? We had, I think, four members, four or five members. Since the pandemic started, we started doing zoom. But and we won't complain about that. We're about 60 members now. We've gotten probably an extra 150 likes over that period, and follows so well, that's funny, we haven't done better than that. I'm getting them into the church.

Yeah, well, maybe there's, you know, maybe that needs a little bit more exploring is what kind of promotions what kind of promotion posts actually get people in there. And I think that could be a whole webinar, you know, but that starts with this stopping the scroll. You know, what, what makes

that information? Yeah.

But Lois has mentioned, you know, Facebook is far simpler for the low tech person than updating a website. And that's, that's part of the point too, and Leticia I think that's it, as well as it just maintains our presence. And we may not see any, you know, specific results, but it does maintain our presence in a very, you know, minimal effort in order to do that. Can I think that's worth worth doing as well?

Yeah, Facebook polls. Good question. Um, you know, I, I think if you start to see, thank you, Carlos, for asking if I think if you start to see people engaging with your Facebook page, then finding ways to engage in with things like polls. Makes sense. You know, because you do want, you do want people responding, you know, you don't want to just scrolling and looking at it, but you want them actually engage and I've heard of people using polls that way. I know that's something ministers do in larger churches I see a lot you know, was they'll put a poll out there and just see what happens but so that's that's a good example of, you know, finding ways to engage people with them.

So all right, well, it's seven, it's on the hour, it's a one minute till the hour. So anyway, this is I plan to do more of these and to go into more in depth and some of these other things. But I really encourage you to give this a try. If you aren't having if you don't have a plan, just try this plan, you know, and just see how it works. Or if you have a plan, if you learn something new here that you might want to mix into your plan, go ahead and give it a try. But I think in the future, we'll look at what makes a good promotional post. We'll look at ads, perhaps we'll look at what live streaming might do on Facebook, we might look at how to do that Instagram stuff, too. But I plan to do these regularly for you because I do think social media is important for small congregations because that's how we let people know who we are. Okay, so on the hour, folks, was so good to see you all. I'll send you an email with the resources. All right.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai