Social Media Tips to Start the New Year

The start of a new year is always a great time of reflection and inspiration. It is where you can leave all the past behind you and begin anew. With that new beginning there also comes a time for you to think through how you can improve and do things differently. What better thing to think about for Digital Missionaries in the new year than to rethink how to use social media more effectively.

Here is a list of social media tips and reminders that will help you be more effective today than you were yesterday.

• Create Intro/Short-form Videos. This is NOT new but what I am going to suggest may be. Ben Stapley and Dave Adamson are two fantastic communicators who use video really well. They both have YouTube channels and utilize Instagram and Twitter well. But one thing they do really well is to create intro videos to their videos or blog posts or do short-form videos to talk about a topic. It’s a great way to share insights or encouragement to others.
• Think Relationships not Followers. Social media is relational. The more you engage the more involvement people have with you. That is why you need to have the mindset of developing relationship on social media not increasing your “like” total on your different platforms.
• Cross-post but be Unique to each Platform. Ever go on Facebook and see some tag someone and it looks all funky? Well that is because people post on Instagram and it automatically shares to Facebook and Twitter and the people or Churches they tag don’t have the exact same profile name on each platform. Posting on all networks your content is fine but don’t automate it to go directly to the other networks. The reason why is because it doesn’t look right. Take time to post directly to each platform so people can click the right links and connect with the right people and ministries.
• Focus on helping not promoting. So many people use social media just for promoting this or that. It becomes so much that people eventually tune you out. Whether it’s a person or a ministry, take more time helping people, encouraging people and offering hope to others. The more you can focus on helping, the more likely they will listen to you when you do promote or share about something you or your ministry is doing.
• Make sure your Accounts are up to date. Things change over time. Make sure all your contact information is up to date. That way, if someone is looking for more information from you, you have the right information up there for people to get in touch with you.
• Stay active and don’t bite off more than you can chew. The tendency on social media is to get on a ton of social networks and post all the time. While it may be easy to do at first, keeping up that pace may be hard to keep up with over time. That is why you stay active, but don’t bite off more than you can chew.
• Stay current on what’s trending and evaluate if and how you should be apart. There are always new things popping up in the social media and digital world. Stay current on all the trends and see how you can contribute to what is trending. That doesn’t mean you have to jump in immediately be apart of it for you or your ministry. Carefully evaluate if it fits into your social media strategy and then process how to do it effectively and consistently before you make it apart of your strategy.

These are just some social media tips and reminders that you can use to improve your social media game and be more effective as a digital missionary. There may be some new insights on here or some great reminders that you can use. They aren’t the only ones around but some that I think can really help as you process and plan a whole new year of using social media to minister to people.

What do you think? What are some social media tips you would recommend? Share your thoughts or experiences below or on social media using #ymsidekick when you share.

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