Creating Social Content Doesn’t Have to Be Hard.

How to create a content engine that you can sustain

When talking about creating great content consistently, most churches would say it’s not easy.

I agree.

For starters, most people working in a church are doing multiple jobs. They’re the Worship pastor and the Comms director. Or the Comms person and the Connections pastor. So when it comes to sitting down and creating content for social and the like, it’s something in addition to an already busy schedule.

So I want to give you an easy way to create great content — and do so consistently. First, churches are content-making machines already!
Your pastor is putting hours into content every week.

It’s called the sermon.

On average, pastors in America spend 6–12 hours working on their sermons. They range from 30–80 minutes (maybe more for some of you). There are videos, sermon outlines and illustrations every week and most churches are not tapping into that for content creation.

Getting Meta

I’m about to get meta, but you’re ready for it. Here’s what I have my church clients doing right now!

NOTE: you can do this a lot of different ways but I want to show you how easy this can be.

1. Capture the sermon in HD video

Most churches I know are already doing this. If not, start now. It’s worth the investment! These cameras are cheap.

2. Edit the full sermon into short clips

Have someone edit the best points from the message. Usually you can get 5–10 out of them. Look for stories, jokes and inspirational points that have something of value in them and that can stand alone.

Now you have a full sermon and 5–10 shorter clips from that one sermon video. That’s already 6 pieces of content at least.

3. Create Instagram quote graphics from these points

By now you should have identified the best clips from the sermon so chances are there are some great quotes, verses, or pithy phrases that you can turn into a quote graphic. How?

You can always use Photoshop but I want to show you how to do this on your phone.

Download an app like Over. (You also may like Font Candy+)

Find a good looking photo. There are incredible photo sites like Unsplash that allow you to use beautiful photography for free. There’s no excuse to use lame photos today. Many of these are integrated into these apps so you never need to leave the app.

You should be able to create 5–10 of these from the clips you edited from the sermon.

Paste your quote, phrase, verse or point on top of photo or use a solid background.

So at this point, you should have a full sermon, 5–10 shorter video clips from the message and at least 5 instagram quote graphics.

That’s at least 11 pieces of content from 1 sermon!

4. Turn a sermon into an article

Few are turning sermons videos into articles. Articles can be an easy way to build engagement on your blog and on other sites! Submitting your articles to Christian sites can extend your reach. How to do it?

Send your video/audio file to a place like Fiverr. You can usually transcribe a sermon for about 5 bucks. Check it out here.

Then have a pastor, volunteer or decent writer on staff tweak the language to read more like an article. You can also outsource it to a writer too. I highly recommend that. (You can also work with an agency to do all of this for you.)

It should cost anywhere from $5–20 to transcribe and $0-50 to turn into an article.

So now you should have a full sermon, 5 video clips, 5 instagram graphics and a blog post. That’s a minimum of 12 pieces of content from 1 video!

5. Maximizing Blog Post for Facebook

Now that you have an article, you need to think about how to use it on your social profiles. I prefer using this tactic on Facebook. Take some of the points in the article and post them as individual thoughts on Facebook.

You should be able to get 5–10 of these. For example:

Here’s a blog post that I created from a video.

Create a post in Facebook based on one of your points.

I’ve been able to create 5–7 different Facebook posts from one article.

We’re at 17 pieces of content from one sermon!

This is changing how my clients are thinking about content. It’s giving them a place to start and a base to count on. Then they focus their efforts on filling in the gaps from there. Gallop released research that said, 76% of churchgoers go because of the sermon content. By maximizing the content as mentioned above, you’re giving people what they’re interested in the most.

Keep it up, and let me know what you find.

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