your,Church,Social,Part,Optimi DIY Is your Church Social? Part 4: “Optimizing Your YouTube Chur

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I’ve been looking at ways churches can use social media to market theironline church marketing and reach others for Christ. In the lastarticle I gave several ideas for videos that your church can create. Inthis article I’ll discuss some simple ways to increase theeffectiveness of your church’s videos as an online church marketingplan.Tips:Posting videos on video sharing sites canbe a great way to spread the word about your church and tell othersabout Christ, but just posting videos isn’t enough. Here are a few tipsabout how to get the most out of your church video sharing:• Put a link to your church’s website at the beginning of the video’s description.Having a link to your church’s website will provide an easy way forpeople to visit your church’s site. Also, often the description of avideo is truncated, only showing the first few words of thedescription. By putting your church’s link at the beginning of thedescription, you ensure it will be visible whether the description istruncated or not. It can also help with search engine marketing.• Put your church’s URL on the video.There are a lot of video editing software options out there (cheap andexpensive) and pretty much all of them will allow you to put text on avideo. If you don’t have and can’t afford video editing software, justmake sure your church website’s URL is in the shot at the end of thevideo. It could be on a sign, whiteboard, or shirt. It’s very importantin church marketing that people know what website to go to, so tellthem.• Use popular keywords in the title and description of the video.Make sure the keywords are relevant, but use popular keywords insteadof less-searched words. It will give your video more visibility. Forexample, this article is titled “YouTube Video Ideas”, not “VideoSharing Website Ideas”. That’s because the keyword, “YouTube” issearched for much more often than “Video Sharing Website”.• Use Viral Functions like “Share This Video”.YouTube and other sites have features like “Share This Video” that makeit easy for people to tell others about the video. Get yourcongregation involved and have them use these features to share thevideos with their friends, family, co-workers, etc.YouTube or Tangle?Associal media started growing in popularity, Christians have been rightthere creating their own websites for the various social media. When itcomes to video sharing, the biggest Christian site by far isTangle.com. So, with both Christian and secular video sharing sitesavailable, it begs the question, should churches use the Christiansites, like Tangle, or the secular sites, like YouTube. I thinkultimately your church will need to decide that.There arepositives and negatives for both options. One of the biggest benefitsof using YouTube is that more people use it…a lot more. So, you havethe potential to reach a lot more people. One of the biggest problemswith YouTube is that they host videos that you may not want youchildren (or yourself) to see and they will sometimes even list somevideos like that on the same page as your church’s video. With Tangle,you know the video content will be family safe and Christian, butyou’re not going to reach non-Christians at Tangle.So, which do you use? I’d say both.Tangle:Tangleis good for marketing your church to Christians. There are a lotChristians moving or looking for a new church and Tangle can be a goodway to let those Christians know about your church. Also, with Tanglebeing a safe website, it can be a good place for your congregation toview the videos, though your website is an even better place for that.YouTube:YouTubeextends the reach of your church and have more of an effect reachingthe unchurched. As I’ve mentioned before, Christ spent a lot of timewith sinners. "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. Ihave not come to call the righteous, but sinners." (Mark 2:17). If weare going to reach the lost for Christ, we need to go to the lost, notexpect them to come to us. So, post your videos on YouTube as well asTangle. Have your congregation use the viral features in YouTube toshare the videos with their friends and family, especiallynon-Christians.Final Notes:I talk a lot aboutYouTube and Tangle because they are the most popular video sharingsites, but there are many other video sharing sites. You may want tosearch out some other video sharing sites in addition to YouTube andTangle to reach even more people. I’d also encourage you to put yourchurch’s videos on your church’s website in addition to the videosharing sites. The first reason is because sending your congregation toyour church’s website to view videos is a great way to get them used tochecking the church site regularly. The second reason is that more andmore websites are using video. By using video on your church’s websiteit can make your church’s site more interesting and up to date.