All Souls operates on Instagram and Facebook regularly. It’s highest interaction takes place on Instagram so all the recommendations below will cater this information. All Souls has had an account for about 2 years on each platform. So far, there is a steady increase in followers, likes and commenting as the community is growing.
All Souls Social Media Audience Behavior
When crafting written content, it is important to consider the audience at hand. The majority of of engagement comes from the following target market:
People based in Arizona; primarily, Phoenix followed by Mesa, Chandler, Tempe and Peoria.
Majority ages 35-44 followed by 25-34
All Souls slightly favors a female audience (52.1%) to it’s male audience (47.9%)
Engagement is highest in the morning (between 8-11am) and after 6pm.
People are most likely to:
“Like” content
Share content (via DMs, stories etc)
“Save” content
“Comment” on content
Videos receive high engagement on FB & IG. Recommendation: rather than sharing from IG to FB, post directly to both.
You always want to start from the desired end results when planning your social media strategy. Since the end goal can change over time, I will provide you with questions that help users think through their online behavior to receive the interaction that they desire.
Answering these questions as you plan:
Why is All Souls social media? Keeping the mission in mind will inform what content you want to keep repeating (with new and old followers in mind). All Souls exists for a diverse and passionate community of truth-seekers, peace-makers, justice-doers, and joy-givers.
In general, All Souls intends to use social media to:
Increase brand awareness
Generate new leads who ultimately visit the church
Raise donations
Build a community
Who is All Souls looking to reach?
Answer is in your brand book: All Souls aims to attract a diverse demographic of local and transplant urbanites, across ethnic, economic, and academic backgrounds; who are all looking to be rooted and connected to the community.
Justice-oriented people: We appeal to urban professionals across sectors and experiences who are looking to make a positive and meaningful impact while exploring what deep soul transformative justice looks like.
Community-invested people: We seek out locals and transplants who are committed to the flourishing of Phoenix and the surrounding suburban communities.
Diverse urban dwellers: From educators to creators, nonprofit leaders, and mental health professionals, we embrace a wide variety of urban professionals at every stage of their careers. We build opportunities for partnership to better serve our neighbors.
What type of content are you going to share regularly?
Photos
Videos
Graphics designed in Canva
Where are you going to share?
IG & FB (I will also provide you with best practices for success on each platform)
When are you going to share?
12-15x a month in the morning (between 8-11am) and/or after 6pm.
Creating content from 15th of the month to the 15th of the month gives just enough window time for you to have a sense of what is happening in the world and gives you room to create content that speaks to that effectively.
Questions to keep at the forefront of content creation:
What is All Soul’s target audience experiencing right now and how does that affect their behavior online?
What goals and challenges do they have?
How can All Souls help/provide relief through social media? (ie. pointing viewers toward a resource, inviting viewers to an event, offering digital prayers or sermon engagement opportunities)
Whenever possible, keep your goals SMART when developing your social media content. Meaning, your content is to be:
Specific: What are you trying to accomplish or communicate?
Measurable: Is the platform you are sharing this content on tracking metrics? If so, please gather data monthly to determine what is achieving desired success. Determine what metrics matter to you and work to exceed them monthly.
Available metrics and what they mean are as follows:
Reach. Post reach is the number of unique users who saw your post. How far is your content actually reaching users’ feeds?
Clicks. This is the number of clicks on your content or account. Tracking clicks per campaign is essential to understand what drives curiosity or encourage people to buy.
Engagement. The total number of social interactions divided by the number of impressions. This sheds light on how well your audience perceives you and their willingness to interact.
Hashtag performance. What were your most-used hashtags? Which hashtags were most associated with your brand? Having these answers can help shape the focus of your content going forward.
Organic and paid likes: Beyond a standard Like count, these interactions are attributed to paid or organic content. This data can help you determine how much money you want to spend on advertising.
Sentiment. This is the measurement of how users reacted to your content, brand or hashtag. Did customers find your recent campaign offensive? What type of sentiment are people associating with your campaign hashtag?
Attainable: Can you follow through on what you are communicating? (ie. giveaways)
Relevant: Does your audience care about the content going out?
Timely: How long ago did the trending content come out? You don’t want to be behind the curve consistently. Keep pace with culture (in light of your mission).
Establishing a visual flow:
People recognize brands the way we recognize people-- memorable and consistent features. An effective brand has a particular style that is very identifiable. All Souls overall
should remain consistent with its brand book. As graphics are designed in Canva, keep the color palette consistent with the brand colors and organize your visual flow in 3’s. Creating content a visual row at a time will prove to be more effective over time as you are determining a color palette.
Ways to win on Facebook:
Build community through focused content made for specific Facebook groups
Facebook is focusing its attention away from public pages to private experiences since private messaging and small groups are taking over online communities. Many of these private experiences are happening within groups on Facebook. Groups that are hyper-focused, no matter how small they start, tend to bring more engagement. It can also serve as a valuable tool to track data pertaining to potential church attendees. Facebook groups automatically place your audience into segments, which can inform your use of paid and targeted ads. They can also directly affect the content you choose to share because they will tell you what they want to hear/talk about.
Respond to People
Take every opportunity to let your audience know that you care about their opinions and want to keep an open line of communication with them by responding to their messages, comments and other forms of digital engagement.
Get into videos and lives
Did you know that 45% of people watch more than an hour of video on Facebook or YouTube a week? Adding video content to your Facebook marketing strategy is an effective way of increasing that coveted engagement metrics. There is a catch though. Facebook prefers content that is uploaded directly to their platform. Try to schedule posts directly on the platform that you want to see engagement increase on.
Be Consistent
Engagement is not just about the quality of your content. It’s about the consistency of your posting habits. Aiming for 12-15 posts a month help you keep a steady flow of interactions with your audience because they can expect to hear from you a few times a week, consistently. This is the way forward with online relationships.
Ways to win on Instagram:
Pay attention to your bio:
People decide in ⅕ of a second if they want to engage your brand ever again. Take every opportunity to make a powerful first impression. Pay close attention to your Instagram profile and bio. An ideal Instagram bio should:
Explain your brand and what you do
Appeal to your target audience
Use your brand tone and voice to help you connect with your community
Include a link to your website or a platform that strings multiple sites together (ie.
. Keep in mind that Instagram captions are limited to 2,200 characters, and after three lines of text they become truncated with an ellipsis.
Study your most successful posts every month
Use your ‘insights’ on Instagram to understand:
Which posts are getting the most likes
How the number of posts you share can influence your engagement
Your most commented on content
Understanding your most successful posts gives you insight into what you need to post more of to keep your audience’s attention.
Don’t leave your audience hanging. Please respond to comments on your posts.
Responding to comments is a great way to build a strong community on Instagram. Whenever someone takes the time to share their thoughts with you, it’s important to respond back to them and show that you’re listening. This encourages positive word of mouth and creates new brand advocates because over 90% of consumers are likely to recommend a brand to others after interacting with them on social media.
Use hashtags
Hashtags exist to promote discoverability. Any brand seeking to increase its reach needs to employ them as much as possible, while analyzing their performance through the insights tab. As you use existing hashtags to increase discoverability, also get into the habit of using original hashtags to your brand to create a space for brand loyal users to stay connected with your content specifically.
Use human faces in your posts to boost engagement
Pictures with faces get:
38% more likes
32% more comments
Take followers behind the scenes
Let your audience see your process mentally, spiritually and physically. Are you planning an event? Share your preparation. Are you processing a world event? Tell us about it. Doing this reveals the human side of your ministry to your audience and gives your followers an exclusive peek into life and values of All Souls so that they grow more invested and connected to what you produce and are doing.
There you have it. Now go forward and be successful.
