How Frequently Should Churches Really Post On Social Media?

[a guest post by Jeremy Smith, author of “By The Numbers: A Longitudinal Study on the Digital Ministry of America’s Largest Churches“]

There is this notion floating around which has gained ground that a magic number exists for how frequently a church should post on different social media platforms to get the best reach every day. The concern pastors want to overcome is the same from the social media account as it is from the pulpit. How many creative quibs do I need to share to be an expert, how long can this sermon go, and how many announcements will I be able to share and people still be willing to listen to me? Too many points and the audience becomes tired or annoyed and leave, too few and you have left possible marketing points or event advertisements on the table.

For some people, this magical number comes from the generalized statistics that bloggers and businesses are trying to find online. The problem is these statistics are always changing, so no actual value can be found here. Further, unless your ministry truly is a business at its core, I would be hesitant to use these stats. We want to get people into the church to hear the Gospel and devote their lives to the Kingdom, but we are not selling a product.

I decided to take this into my own hands and evaluated 12,253 social media posts in December 2014 on three different social media platforms from the 100 largest churches in America in 2014. I assume that these churches are looking to innovate, pioneer, and devote resources to reaching people digitally. Here is what I found:

• Not a single church posted every day of the month and the average church posted about 3 times a week.
• 27 churches posted a frequency of at least once a day, 6 of them at least three times a day, and 1 church reached more than five times a day. The average was once a day.
• Only 20 churches tweeted a frequency of less than once a day whereas 18 churches tweeted five times a day and 2 churches as high as 12 and 16 times a day. The average church posted three times a day.

Ultimately, it depends upon more factors or your church target audience, what resources you are willing to devote to this, how creative you can be with your content, and what you hope to gain from your social media strategy to truly define your social media strategy. That being said, this is a beginning spot for posting.

If you would like to see an even further breakdown of the research data, you can actually purchase the By The Numbers eBook at ChurchmagPress.com. For those that would like a free copy of the first three chapters of the eBook, you can get it by signing up for our mailing list here.