13 Ways to Extend Sermon Life With Social Media

If you aren’t taking advantage of social media, you are missing out big time!

In fact, it just might be one of the most powerful tools a pastor can use to extend the life of their sermons.

Schedule Your Posts in Advance

To make your life easier and do everything I am about to suggest, I highly recommend using either Buffer or HootSuite to manage your church’s social media accounts and schedule posts in advance. This will save you a ton of time. You can sit down and schedule out weeks of content so you can spend more time doing other things.

I personally use Buffer to schedule all of my posts for Pro Preacher. I love the ease of being able to quickly drop in posts as I think of them and have them automatically scheduled for me.

13 Ways to Use Social Media to Extend the life of your sermons:

Share video highlights from your sermon.
Share short audio clips from your sermon by uploading to a site like SoundCloud.
Post links to your full message on YouTube, the church website, or your blog.
Post links to your full sermon audio from an iTunes podcast.
Copy your most powerful or memorable statements directly from your manuscript and share them. (A great example of this is what NewSpring Church does with their sermon recap in Tweets)
Take memorable statements and make a graphic out of them. Get a graphic artist in your church to help make it. (Powerful quotes and pictures spread like crazy on social networks).
Ask questions about the message. Generate further discussion of the message with your congregation after the sermon is over.
Give people homework and ask them to post about it. For example, ask them to do one random act of kindness and then share about it. You could use a thread on your Facebook page or using specific hashtag on Twitter like #RandomKindness.
Dig up old content from the archives and repost it. Old sermon manuscripts, video or audio. If you are doing a series, maybe dig up some related stuff from the past if people are interested in more about that specific topic.
If you are blogging and repurposing sermon content like I suggested, post links to every new blog post, and pull a few from the archives every once in a while too.
Post key Bible verses from your sermon and challenge your church to live it, or memorize it.
If you used an especially funny or powerful story, copy and paste it into a post. You might be surprised how many people share it with their friends or followers.
Encourage people to Tweet highlights of the message during your service or directly after (maybe from the notes they wrote in the bulletin). This is a form of note-taking that will help them remember the point longer, and a cool way to spread your message to their network of friends.

Choosing the Best Social Network

How do you know which social network is best for you? The best social network is the one that your people are already using. Go where your people are. This probably means that you will be using either Facebook or Twitter primarily.

But don’t just guess about it. Survey your congregation. Ask them what social network they use the most. What is their favorite?

You may find that you have a lot of people on Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIn, or some new one that you’ve never heard of. Who knows?

Do your homework, find what works best, and get your message out.