Josh Burns > The easter social media invitation

As a church communicator there is one day takes the majority of my attention between the months of January-April, and that day is Easter!

In case you weren’t aware, there are a couple realities of this day that I think are important for us to think about as we plan our communication strategy during this time:

1. Easter is the highest attended church service across the globe every year.
2. Easter is one of the only days every year when non-churched people will attend a church service.
3. People in your church will invite a friend to an Easter service if they’re given the tools to do so.

Since these three points are true, we as church communicators should take very seriously our roles in making these Easter services easy for people to share with their friends. I’ve been to too many churches where there was more time spent on planning the Easter service than there was in a communication plan to invite people to the Easter service. Which is why I put time into creating a social media plan for our Easter services each year.

The Invitation
Part of this social media plan should be an invitation. This could be a simple Facebook post or tweet containing just text, or even better, it could be a graphic of some sort. Or ideally both. Since we’re now in the visual era of social media it’s almost a requirement that you have some sort of graphic to accompany this invitation. In fact I would argue that the graphic should be the invitation.

It’s important that this graphic is compatible with all platforms, and the great thing right now is that there is typically one dimension that works well on all platforms and that is a square. The exact dimensions I use are 800×800. This can be used on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Here’s an example of what we used last year for our social media invitation. Admittedly this graphic was probably a little too heavy on the text, but it still got the job done. And it’s worth noting that this post was our most viewed post of the entire year! And the reason for that is that little number in the lower right corner. That is the number of shares this post received, and it’s because we made the simple ask (in the copy of the post) for people to share it with their friends. Our invitation didn’t include service times or any specific information because we are a multisite church with 6 campuses, so it just contained a link to one page with all of the service times.

The other aspect that made this post sharable is that it looked good. We were very intentional with this design, and that’s going to be even more important this year. You have to step up your design if you want to reach people.

And praise the Lord that last year’s Easter services were our highest attended services ever! I obviously won’t take all the credit for that because there were scores of people working behind the scenes to make it happen, but I know without a doubt that this social media plan affected it in even the smallest ways.

I received emails from several of you last week saying that you have never had a social media plan in place for Easter at your church, but you’d love some help. Well I heard you loud and clear, which is why I’m going to be sharing my full Easter social media plan next week in my exclusive email.

If you want to receive my full social media plan for Easter, you can sign up here!

Are you planning anything specific on social media to invite people to your Easter service?

Have you done anything like this in the past? Has it worked?

Join the conversation

About Josh Burns

Josh Burns is the director of web and social media at Park Community Church in Chicago, IL. He loves helping churches grow their online presence to reach more people with the gospel of Jesus Christ. Click here to get weekly social media resources for your church and a free church social media calendar.

Connect with Josh on his blog and twitter.