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So. You’ve got a church Facebook page and/or Instagram profile and/or TikTok account and/or Youtube Channel and/or Twitter (X) feed and/or…
Now what?
What do you post? What should be on your page? Should you treat it like your personal profile(s) where you post the things that make you happy or make you think, or the things that you want others to know about your life, or the updates others want to hear about? Should you share your opinions and thoughts? How do you best represent your body of Christ while recognizing that the body is not just *you* as the social media manager?
Keep reading for some social media post ideas for your small church. Most of these will be best-suited for Facebook pages (since that’s the most-used platform by churches), but the ideas can get your gears turning for things that you can share to any other social media platform your church may use. The medium may change (from text to images to videos…) but the broad content can stay the same.
Social Media Presence Matters
Do you use social media for your personal life? What do you use it for? Most of us use it to share our thoughts, ideas, opinions, lives, information we found helpful, updates, or something else along those lines. We use it to share our lives with those around us. Some of us have small private circles and are friends with only those we know in real life while others have public profiles that can be seen by anyone around the world.
The church can greatly benefit from being on social media for the same reason you can – it keeps the church connected to those around it. Having a social media presence is a great way to connect with long-time church members, new members, visitors, potential visitors, and community members with a few keystrokes and the push of a button.
Social media is a powerful tool for connectivity. Your church community benefits from being able to connect with each other during the week. The surrounding community benefits from seeing a living, breathing, active body of Christ.
If you’re here, you probably already know you need to be sharing *something.* But sometimes we’re stuck on how to show the life of the church – we need social media post ideas.
20 Social Media Post Ideas For Your Small Church
1. Sunday Service Post/Link
Each week, assume people need to know what’s going on for Sunday. While (hopefully) church life also happens outside of Sunday morning, for most of us, Sunday is the main time we gather. So each week, either on Saturday or Sunday morning, share your livestream link and/or an invitation to worship with the time of your service! If you’re posting it on Sunday morning, make sure you’re posting it at least a few hours before service so that the algorithms have time to distribute your post.
2. Upcoming Events
Have an event coming up? Make sure you share it! You can make an event “flier” for social media using Canva that can be shared on Facebook and Instagram. You can even take it a step further and make it a short video that can be shared on TikTok or YouTube, but even if you only have Facebook, know that reels (60-second or under videos) often have a better reach than static images or text-only posts.
An important reminder about images and videos – they don’t have to be fancy, but you also don’t want them to be too wordy. If you’re making a flier, put the event name, date, time, and location. For a video, it’s the same thing – just get decent lighting, use the “selfie camera” on your phone, and record a message with the who, what, when, and where! Keep it brief and to the point!
For larger events (like a concert or your church’s VBS), you can make a Facebook Event page so that it gets shared more with the community for people looking for things to do. For smaller or recurring events (think potlucks, monthly gatherings, etc.), you can just post to your own Facebook page. The larger or more “special” the event is to your church, the more often you want to share it (like once a week or so for a handful of weeks leading up to it), whereas recurring events don’t even necessarily need to be shared every time they happen.
3. Photos And Videos From Events
Shortly after the event (within the following 24 hours), share images and videos from the event! These are almost always some of the highest-performing posts on any church’s social media page. Why? Because people like seeing themselves and sharing what they did with others! The algorithms also really like sharing “real” images, so they’re naturally prone to being better distributed.
Pick a handful (10 or fewer) of images and share a brief blurb about what happened. Then build anticipation for the next event! (A note – technically your Sunday morning service counts as an event, too – share pictures from Sunday mornings sometimes, too!).
4. Sermon And/Or Inspirational Quotes
Did something really stick out from the pastor’s sermon? Or is there a timely quote that is meaningful for where your church is at right now or where your church wants to be? Then share it!
You can make that quote look even better by using a “quote” image. These are easily made from several templates in Canva – just search “quote” and then tweak an image to fit your needs!
Bible verses count within this category! If your inspirational quote is a Bible verse, I highly suggest checking out Life Church’s huge array of scripture art, which can be found here.
Inspirational quotes are a “sometimes” thing – don’t overdo it just to have something on your page. Make sure it’s meaningful!
5. Sermon Takeaways
On Sunday afternoons or on Mondays, share the takeaways or action points from yesterday’s sermon. How can it be applied to the lives of those following you? This is also a great time to remind people where to find the sermon if they missed it (your YouTube or podcast channel, your website, or just further down your Facebook page).
A reminder, though – the social media algorithms don’t love sharing posts that have links in them. It’s often better to put the links in the comments!
6. Sermon Video Clips
This one can be a bit tricky if you aren’t terribly tech-savvy or don’t have a budget to pay for clips, but it’s one of the best ways to utilize unique content your church is already creating every week.
If you record or live stream your services, try to find some 1-minute-or-less clips during the sermon that are either really good points or good summary-type moments in the sermon that make people interested in watching the rest of the sermon.
If you want to do it by hand, you can utilize Canva to create mobile video clips. Once you’ve gotten the process down, you can make video clips in about half an hour to an hour. If time is short, there are sermon clip creators (one of the most popular is Sermon Shots) that can take the sermon and turn it into a video for $30-$40/month.
If that sounds pretty steep for your small church income, you can do some “time math” to figure out if it’s worth it for you. For example, imagine you’re paid $15/hour – that means it takes less than 3 hours of your work over the course of a month to pay for a sermon clip creator to make shareable clips for you. 3 hours over the course of a month is probably pretty close to how much time it takes me now to do these clips; it took me much longer when I started.
7. Prayer Requests
Prayer is a powerful thing. And we want to pray for others. Providing a space for people to know they can share prayer requests from time to time is a good way to demonstrate that you care for others and you’re dedicated to praying for them. Make sure you give people the space to send a private message because not everyone wants their prayer request out there for all to see.
If there is an urgent prayer request, and you’re given permission to share, you can share those on your page, too. For our church, this tends to be limited to sharing a death or major hospitalization.
8. Member/Volunteer Spotlights
The people are the church. So let the people be seen!
You can set up a weekly or monthly member/volunteer spotlight where you share about ways someone is serving in the church! Maybe take time to interview them and find out a little bit more about them – how long they’ve been in the church, what they like about the church/serving, any advice they have for people thinking about getting involved, etc.
Any time you can share a real face of a real person in your church, do it. It demonstrates the truth that the church is not a building. It’s not just Sunday morning. It’s a body of believers on a mission to seek and save the lost and to have a positive impact in the community and in the world.
9. Volunteer Opportunities
Volunteer opportunity posts can easily be coupled with the volunteer spotlight mentioned above! Need another children’s ministry volunteer? Share a picture of one of your current teachers and invite people to join that teacher in the mission of serving the children of the church.
You can also make these a separate post, especially if you’re starting something new and don’t have volunteers yet! When we were restarting our very defunct van ministry to pick people up for Sunday mornings, we shared a picture of our van with a request for people to volunteer to be part of a rotation of drivers.
If you’re separating out the volunteer opportunities from a weekly/monthly member spotlight, then you can share these types of posts when you have a specific need.
10. Community/Global Outreach
How are you reaching out into your community or globally? Are you partnering with a local school to bring school supplies to the students? Are you raising funds for a local charity? Are you participating in a short-term missions trip? Does your church support global servants somewhere? Share it!
When the church is serving the community and helping to reach the world, these are great things to share online! They demonstrate, once again, that the church is not the building but the people and that you’re committed to having a positive impact in the community.
A little idea within this: Our church has started a “Little Things” outreach of small ways we can have a big impact on the community. Each month, we have a different outreach focus. These include things like collecting school supplies, personal hygiene items for a local pantry, bags for our community’s weekend lunch program for students, bags for one of the food pantries, hats and gloves for the school, food for an after-school program, etc.
11. Bible Trivia Engagement Posts
Engagement posts where you encourage people to respond are great ways to drive up engagement so that the algorithms respond by showing more of your content to people! These types of posts are a once-a-week max type of post.
Bible Trivia can take on a few forms. You can make a “guess the story from emojis” post in Canva. You can give clues to a Bible character and see who can guess it. Share a song and see who can tell you what the related Bible story or verse is. Make it multiple choice or have people leave their guesses in the comments!
12. Testimonies And Testimonials
Stories are powerful. We have the stories of people in scripture, but each of us also has our own story. Share these stories on your social media page. If your church does adult baptisms, a good time to share a testimony would be around the time that person is getting baptized. These stories can be written in a blog-post style or they can be a video (either an interview or just the person sharing their story).
Testimonials follow a similar vein. If you’re offering an event or study that you’ve offered in the past (for example, our church regularly offers Emotionally Healthy Discipleship courses), you can interview someone who has already gone through it so that they can share their experiences and help get people excited for what they could participate in!
13. Devotionals
A great way to help continue what you’re talking about on Sundays is to offer a devotional at least once during the week. This can be a deeper dive into the passage preached through on Sunday or additional texts that relate to what you’re talking about.
You can also opt to have a devotional completely separate from your Sunday morning series but still offers people a chance to connect with Jesus beyond Sunday morning.
Either way, having a devotional encourages your church community to remember that their relationship with God needs to be fed more often than once a week, and you can provide them the tools and resources to do that.
14. Behind The Scenes
Have a big event coming up like VBS? Have some pictures of your worship team practicing? Did you snap a shot of your custodian while they were cleaning? Is your pastor working on their sermon at a coffee shop this morning? Are your Sunday School teachers meeting to prepare and pray over the next school year?
One of the best ways to help people see that so much goes into a church beyond the hour you’re together on Sunday morning is to let people see it! You can share these posts any time – they’re a great reminder of how much we need the different parts of the body of Christ, and they may spark some interest in others wanting to participate!
15. Sunday Worship List/Playlists
What was that song we sang on Sunday?
I want to know what we’re singing so I can listen to it beforehand.
Where can I listen to the songs we’re singing?
Each week, a great way to build anticipation for Sunday morning and help prepare hearts for worship is to share what songs you’ll be singing! Since you can access posts later, people can visit your page after church on Sunday if they were really touched by a song that was sung and want to hear it again but don’t know the name.
You can also use your Sunday morning worship list post as an extra opportunity to invite people to join for worship (so share your service time in the post!). Again, this builds anticipation.
You can even take this a step further by compiling a playlist on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, etc. that people can access during the week. This playlist can be all the songs you sing with regularity. As an added bonus, if you have someone demonstrate an interest in participating in leading worship, you can share this playlist with them, too, so that they can get familiar with all the songs you sing.
If you don’t have a regular rotation of songs, so your playlist would be as long as your hymnal, you could make a list of church favorites so that people can hear those songs that are precious to them even beyond Sunday morning.
16. Book Recommendations
Sometimes, there’s a book you’ve just got to share with your church. Maybe it’s something you’re going to have a book study on. Maybe your pastor referenced it in the sermon. Maybe it’s on mission with where your church is going. Whatever it is, you can share it on your social media page (and include a link to where people can buy it!).
17. Children/Family Activities
Most churches want to reach the next generation, so compile a list of activities or simple crafts that families can do together and share them once a week or once a month or so from your church’s page! This can be a video of how to do a craft, a step-by-step guide, or a suggestion of a way families can pause from the craziness of life and spend time together! Bonus points if the craft or activity matches what kids are currently learning about in church or Sunday school, but definitely not a requirement!
18. Polls And Questions
Engagement posts are great. If you can toss an engagement post in once a week or so, this can really help boost your profile so that it gets shared more regularly. On Facebook, you can leverage the multiple reaction options and turn them into a poll (For example, take a Roll Call – “Laugh” if you’re under 30, “Love” if you’re 31-45, “Care” if you’re 46-60, and “Like” if you’re 61+). You can also ask a question and encourage people to answer in the comments.
These types of engagement posts are great if you can tie them back into an event you’re having because then your post is a double-whammy (for example, we had a Hymn Sing, so we asked for favorite songs and used those to help prepare a few songs for the Hymn Sing and used it as an invitation for them to come sing those favorites they supplied).
19. Community Events
While it may not be a frequent occurrence, it’s a good idea to at least occasionally share community events, namely ones that you can expect a number of people from your church to attend or that your church has a part in (maybe you have a table at the local back-to-school bash or a float in a parade). This helps people who are not part of your church know that you take an active interest in what’s going on in the community and you want to partner with others who are doing good things where you live.
20. Daily Challenges
Every now and then, you might want to share a string of Daily Challenges. These should have a time limit (don’t do a daily challenge that involves a post every day all year – everyone will burn out on seeing these posts). This can look like a week or month-long challenge (like this 30-Day Gratitude Social Media Challenge) where you post something daily for a short period of time. A Bible reading plan could also fall into this category, but if your plan lasts the whole year, maybe only post about it once a month or so (such as “Here’s the list of this month’s reading plan!”).
Fostering A Sense Of Belonging
The best posts to share from your church’s social media pages are posts that relate to the life of your church or impact your church. The best way to help the community around you know what life in your church is like is to share it so that they can get excited about maybe joining that life. You can foster a sense of belonging as you engage online with your church members and your community.
I hope this list of 20 Social Media Post Ideas helps get the creative juices flowing! Some of these may seem challenging, but the good news is that for many of these, Canva is going to be a powerful tool to help you get the visuals that boost social media success while saving you time and money! I also highly suggest coming up with a weekly or monthly schedule that can help you plan out when you’re going to do each type of post so it doesn’t feel like a daily floundering of “When was the last time I posted _____?”
Many blessings on your social media presence and happy posting!
Read More:
7 Best Strategies And Social Media Tips For Small Churches
Canva: A Practical Guide Through What It Is And How To Use It
