3 Church Website Design Tips to Turbo Charge Your Social Media #ChSocM

Want to turbo charge your church’s social media engagement?

The place to start may surprise you – your church website design.

I’m a firm believer that the hub of communications for every organization should be its website. Social media and other communication channels are like spokes to and from that hub. Therefore, church website design has a huge impact on how many people engage with your church in social media.

3 Church Website Design Tips to Turbo Charge Your Social Media

1) Social media icons/links.

Let’s start with the most obvious… if you want people to engage with your church in social media, design your church website theme to include social media icons that link to your social media profiles. By putting them in the theme, they will be in the same place on every page of your website.

2) Social media share buttons.

Another important social media feature to design into your website are social media share buttons. Designed right, these buttons should be at the top/and or bottom of every page and post of your website. For the Twitter button, it’s best if it includes the name of the page/post, its URL (preferably shortened) and your Twitter profile. For example:

Many Hands Make Light Work – http://ow.ly/9CxI305vIbM by @JourneyCCFL

This way when someone tweets a page or post, the people who see that tweet can click to get to your Twitter profile.

3) Embed social media content into your website.

This is more of a content thing than a website design thing, but one of the best ways to introduce people to your social media channels is by showing them some of the great content you’re sharing there. Every social network has an Embed button on every post, pic, pin and update that when clicked will give you the HTML code to embed that content into a page or post on your website.

For example, if you post a video from a missions trip to YouTube, write a blog post about the trip and embed the video in it:

If you post pics from an event to Facebook, write a blog post about it and embed the entire gallery:

If you’re writing an devotional, blog post, or “thoughts from the pastor” for your site, Tweet quote or scripture verse and then embed that tweet like this:

What is the most difficult question you have encountered about faith in Jesus?

— Journey Church (@journeyccfl) August 10, 2015

When people read the pages and posts on your church website with social media embedded in them, if they have any interest at all in engaging with you on that social media platform, they’re going to click through see what else you’ve posted. If they like what they see, they’ll like/follow/subscribe.

Want to learn more from about designing your church website to turbo charge social media engagement with a community of passionate church communicators?

Join us for tonight’s #ChSocM chat – here – Tuesday Oct 25, 2016 at 9 PM ET

Thoughts?

1. Which of these 3 tips are you already using?  Which do you plan to implement?
2. Got any other church website design tips that could help increase a church’s social media engagement?