Looking after your chaplaincy social media channels is an exciting opportunity, helping your chaplaincy support its community and reach new people. We know there will be a lot for you to consider, especially if you are new to the role, so we have put together a list to get you started in the best possible way.

Look after yourself

It's important not to allow social media to overwhelm you.  Top tips:

• Only go on it once or twice a day for a specified amount of time

• Switch off if you find content coming up that you are uncomfortable with.  X is particularly difficult for this at the moment.

• You can increase your likelihood of only seeing posts you want to see by:

  • Interacting positively with only the accounts you are interested in.  E.g. in Instagram, tap the three dots on a suggested post and select "Not Interested" to hide it and other similar posts. 

  • Click 'yes' when asked if you want to 'see more posts like this one'

  • Unfollow accounts and topics: Proactively unfollow accounts or mute topics that consistently provide content you don't want to see.

  • Use "Hide" or "Not Interested" options: When you see a post you don't like, look for options to "Hide" it or select "Not Interested" to train the algorithm to show you less of that content.

  • Prioritise accounts:  Use features like Facebook's "Prioritise who to see first" or Instagram's "Favourites" to ensure posts from your most valued accounts appear more frequently. 

  • Adjust News Feed Preferences on Facebook: Go to "Settings & Privacy" > "Settings" > "News Feed Preferences" to manage who you see first. 

  • Block certain words or phrases on Instagram: You can enter specific words, phrases, or emojis to prevent suggested posts containing them from appearing in your feed: Instagram help centre

Follows for guidance and inspiration

One of the best ways to make the most of your social media as well as enjoy it, is to search for accounts that you can learn from - either by way of inspiration and ideas, or those directly offering advice and guidance. For example, on Instagram, you can find accounts such as:

@thelucasokeefe (social media marketing) or

@Bradyshearer (church social media)

It takes time to find accounts that resonate and work for you, but it's well worth the effort.

Create a plan

A simple and clear plan will look at what you want to achieve and how you are going to do it. Your chaplaincy may already have a digital plan in place; however, if you don’t have one, this is one of the first things you will want to do.  Why are you on a specific channel? Who do you want to reach, why and what would you ideally like them to do?  For example, one of the main reasons to use Facebook might be to reach people who don't already attend your church in order to encourage them to come along.   Facebook will probably give you the opportunity to engage with local tourist or community groups and to publicise events and service times.

Here is a downloadable help sheet that scopes out some of the aspects you should ideally cover in your social media policy.

Take a look at this Church of England blog on how to create a social media strategy

Understand your digital audience

It’s important to have a defined audience in mind when you are creating your content, as this will help you create relevant, helpful and interesting content for your social media platforms.

Take a read of this Church of England blog on understanding your audiences on social media.

Consider your content

Your story:  Remember to post text, images and videos that represent who you are as a chaplaincy, a window into your life as a community.  What makes you special?  What can people expect at your church?

Images and video:  Keep up to date with the way each channel you choose to be on is working and how they will be broadcasting your posts.  That means keeping an eye on the size of your images and the length of your videos.  Sprout Social keeps its advice up to date, so it's worth keeping these pages favourited: Always up to date social media image sizes and Always up to date video specifications. Canva has some useful-sized templates.  At the diocese, we have also created templates for various messages we post, which helps with consistency and also saves time in creation.

Hashtags: The use of hashtags has changed over time.  For our chaplaincies, using your location as a hashtag (as well as adding your location) can be very useful to help new locals or tourists to find you.  More broadly, the Church of England has some excellent advice here: Are hashtags still relevant?

What to post?  See the dedicated page in the Toolkit to delve further into this; social media is a constantly hungry beast to feed, so it pays to be prepared.

Consistency and Scheduling

Consistency is key in building your social media communities.  Keep it up to date and post regularly.  This can be included in your policy.  To help with this, scheduling tools can be very useful. These are a few you could check out (nearly all of these apps will now give you not-for-profit discounts, so always enquire about that before signing up to any accounts):

Buffr

Loomly

Don't forget that you can also schedule directly on most of the social channels now (you can also use them to design content, which will probably get higher returns simply because it will be given precedence).

Keeping your channels a positive experience for all

Spend time with your chaplaincy committee or senior leaders to ensure you have a readymade approach to how you will answer negative comments, or perhaps you are constantly being tagged into posts from charities or individuals that can be burdensome.  There is more information and guidance on this in the Policy Guidance Handout.

Track your progress

Your analytics will provide valuable insights to help you to create an online presence that is responsive to your audience, and able to adapt and grow as the social media landscape changes.

Some of the key analytics that you can track across your channels are:

• Reach – the number of individual accounts your content reached
• Impressions – the total number of times your content was seen by anyone
• Engagements – Likes and reactions, comments, replies, shares, retweets and video views.

In each of these areas look for the posts that performed the best, and the ones that did not. Refine your plan by looking for trends that may be emerging from month to month and look at how can this help you going forward.

Track these statistics on a monthly basis to help build a picture of how your online presence is growing.

Writing for the web

The words we use are important to help us communicate effectively with our online audience, and they will need to adapt depending on whether you are writing a social media post or something for your website.

The Church of England have written a blog on how to tell your church’s story through short-form social media copy

Keep up to date with social media developments and trends

As the social media landscape changes frequently, keeping up to date will help you maintain a successful online presence to serve your community and raise the profile of your chaplaincy.

The Church of England have a few resources to help you with this:

• Digital Labs blogs are updated frequently, covering topics from social media planning to creating content.
• Join the Digital Labs mailing list to get monthly updates on all things digital.

• Our Communications team are on hand to answer your questions so please get in touch by contacting us

   

Safeguarding Policy

It is the responsibility of everyone to ensure the protection of children and vulnerable adults online and offline, and spot the warning signs for those who may be experiencing abuse or online bullying.  Familiarise yourself with the Diocese in Europe Safeguarding Policy and who to contact if you have questions or concerns.