A Social Media Strategy for Kidmin
I’ve been posting and leading the social media for the churches I’ve worked for almost as long as I’ve been a kid’s pastor. For the past 13 years, I’ve moved with the changes to Facebook and Instagram. Established Twitter accounts and even explored Snap Chat and Marco Polo.
Creating daily or even weekly content for all of these platforms can be exhausting and many of these platforms change everything seemingly on a whim. It can be tough to keep up.
In addition, the fallacy of social media is thinking that just posting to one platform one time is enough. It’s not. You have to be consistent and repeat yourself over and over. There is no one silver bullet to church communication. I outline 3 of the methods of communication I use here.
Over the last few months, I think I’ve finally settled on a system for consistent content creation for all the platforms I’m on that keep parents connected and informed.
I use a seven-day plan that is abstract enough to use on almost any platform but defined enough that I don’t have to create something new every day.
When posting, I use the Orange strategy of giving parents the tools, they need to have a conversation with their kids when they wake up, in the car, at the dinner table, and when they go to bed. Everywhere I post, I try to create conversation not necessarily online, but in person between parents and kids. I use social as a place for parents to get resources to talk to their kids about their faith in general and what we’re learning week to week.
So, here’s the plan.
Sunday: Post what we learned today.
This post goes out after Sunday morning services telling parents what we learned today. To help engagement, I use the bottom-line graphic from the day. In addition, the post includes a link to the week’s family devotional. Instead of recreating a link every week, the link I share is to a cloud folder where I update the files every week.
Monday: Ask application question for yesterday's bottom line.
The key here is to create conversation. Not necessarily on my post but with the parents and kids. I know that most parents don’t read the take home paper or click the link I send out on Sunday, so the question is usually from the family devotional. To make it catchy and shareable on Instagram, I create a quick graphic in Canva. You can what I mean below.
I then share this graphic on all my social media feeds.
Tuesday: inspirational quote.
I know I can’t always challenge parents to interact with church content. I also need to encourage them in their parenting efforts. So, on Tuesdays, I post an inspirational quote graphic. You can get these from many different places, but I get mine from orangeleaders.com. It’s a $20 a month subscription but gives me a lot more than social media posts. Also, if you use the 252 Curriculum from Orange, it’s a great add-on.
Wednesday: Dinner conversation starter.
Similar to Monday’s post, I want to create a conversation between the parents and kids about what we learned on Sunday. For this post, I frequently forego my Facebook page and use my Facebook group only. I’ve found the Page engagement to be minimal on these kinds of posts but get a lot more traction in groups.
Sometimes on Wednesdays, I will skip this post and talk about an event for Wednesday night service, but these are rare.
Thursday: Power Verse review.
I’m currently using High Voltage Children’s Ministry Curriculum, which I love, and there is a new Power Verse every week. I’ll post the power verse graphic and an encouragement to memorize it or link it back to bottom line we’re learning that week. If your curriculum uses a monthly or theme verse, you can still post about it every week, just don’t use the same graphic, or find a verse from the lesson that week that can also be applicable.
Friday: Bible story reading.
In my ministry, I rarely just read the story on Sunday mornings. It’s still scripturally based, but sometimes reading from the Bible can be dry and not engaging. However, that does not negate God’s Word and many times there are details that are skipped or glossed over in an effort to engage the kids within the Bible story time. With this in mind, I post a link from Bible Gateway the NIrV version of the Bible story and ask parents to read it at bedtime with their kids. Many times, I will also include a few more application questions from the family devotional to help keep the conversation going.
Saturday: resource connection.
If I’m going to post an announcement, this is the day I will do it. However, there are a lot of resources that parents may not know about, like my Spotify worship playlist, the parent’s Facebook group, or even my texting group with Remind. As of this writing, we’re headed into Thanksgiving and there are three ways kids can serve this Holiday season. So, I created a graphic in Canva and used it.
The beauty of this plan is that whether you are using groups, pages, profiles, stories, reels, TikToks or whatever, you can easily create posts every day that will reach your parents where they are and give them the resources they need to disciple their children. Also, you’re not reinventing the wheel every week or just using social as a megaphone for all the events coming up in your ministry.
