Member Advocacy (Becoming Social Media Ambassadors for Christ)

Dustin Comm

Director of Media & Marketing for Good To Go Media.

With Facebook’s organic reach for Pages declining, organizations are finding new ways to increase how many people see their posts that just aren’t showing up in the News Feed anymore. Some companies have started equipping their employees to share company news and content on their personal social media accounts in a way that includes them in the social media strategy.

Called “employee advocacy,” it provides a simple mechanism for employees to choose from a variety of pre-selected posts, including text, and post to their own social media accounts. Companies are seeing much higher total click-rates when the content is coming from their employee’s personal profiles instead of the company accounts.

Imagine assembling 25 of your church’s most active social media members onto a Member Advocate team and giving them a pool of content to pull from every week. Not only do they get to choose which content they share, but can also suggest new material and truly take ownership of the church’s brand. They can share events your church is promoting, a link to your website, a video your produced, or anything else you’d like to promote. The only difference is it’s not just coming from one account, but many, which ranks that content higher in Facebook’s algorithm.

There are a number of services out there that streamline this process for a fee: Hootsuite offers it’s platform Amplify, SproutSocial has Bambu, and Oktopost and DrumUp are stand-alone solutions. These all make social sharing super-easy for your advocates (members can even schedule their posts for the week) and provide the data on how big your team’s impact was, but come at a price.

However, Member Advocacy is also as easy as sending out an email once a week with links to the content and text. Your advocates simply copy/paste and they’re done. The hard part is getting people to actually post, which is why it’s a good idea to run a gift card contest every month to see who has shared the most. Make sure to include the leaderboard in each week’s content email.

So if your church has no Member Advocacy (aka Digital Discipleship or Social Media Ambassadors) program in place, give it a try. It is so fun to see people getting engaged and taking ownership of the church’s story. And naturally more people will know what is happening in church life since they’re out there promoting it. It’s a win all the way around!

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