your,Church,Social,Part,Using, DIY Is your Church Social? Part 2: “Using Video Sharing for Chur

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I’ve started looking at ways churches can use social media to markettheir church online and reach others for Christ. One of the areassocial media has really exploded over the last several years is videosharing. With websites like YouTube and Tangle.com, Internet users havefound a place where they can share videos, be they funny,informational, outrageous, or uplifting, and people have taken to videosharing and viewing shared videos like a dog to a plate of bacon.YouTube:Accordingto a recent document from Google (owners of YouTube), video sharing andviewing have become a regular activity for all demographics. Men andWomen of all age groups and all education levels use video sharingwebsites like YouTube. YouTube has become the most popularentertainment site on the Internet and the sixth most popular websiteon the web. Here are some interesting stats from a few months ago:• Hundreds of millions of videos viewed daily• 10 hours of video uploaded every minute• 72M unique monthly visitors• 31% of home Internet users watch video on YouTube weekly, 10% daily• The average US visitor spends 4 hours every month watching videos on YouTubeSo,with so many people using YouTube and other video sharing websites, whywouldn’t your church want to get in on the action? It’s free, it’spretty easy, and it can be very effective for getting your message outand with church marketing.There are many aspects to Online video sharing that make it a great online church marketing tool:•Online video sharing can be a great way to reach people who may nototherwise find your church’s website. By posting videos that link backto your church’s website and have your church’s URL in the video, youare able to direct people back to your site and help with search enginemarketing.• You can also reach people who would not normally evensearch for your (or other) churches by posting videos that are not“church-related” videos. This could be a funny (non-churchy) video oran informational video about something not related to church at all.• Online videos can also be a means of changing the image non-churchgoers have of what church is.In an article on Caller.com, Pastor Michael Eaton of Holiday Hills Baptist Church in Abilene, Texas said:“Weare getting more traffic because we are running the same video on ourWeb site as (our) commercial on TV," he said. "We also use this samevideo on our Myspace page.”Many churches are starting to usewebsites like YouTube to market their church and reach the unchurchedfor Christ and are finding it to be a very effective church marketingtool. “But We Don’t Have Thousands Of Dollars For Video Production!”Youdon’t have to. Sure you can spend thousands on producing a professionalquality video. You can hire actors, use special effects, and use thebest cameras available…or you can use the hand-held video camera fromone of you members and not spend a dime. Professional videos can workvery well and depending on what message you are trying to get across,it may be best to spend a little money to make a more professionalvideo. However, YouTube is about community and the regular Joe sharingvideos with his friends and the world. So, a lot of videos on YouTubeare just home videos. Your churches video can be as well. In fact, insome cases, you would do better to use lower quality home video. One ofthe things that attracts a lot of people to video sharing sites is thetruth or real-to-life character of the videos as opposed to theHollywood fakeness they see everyday on the TV.Southern HillsChurch of Christ in Abilene, TX has been using video sharing as amarketing tool for a couple of years now. In an article on Caller.com,they talk a bit about some of the videos they have shared, includingmore professionally done videos like their “Churchgoer vs. Christian”series (a take off of the popular Mac commercials) and lessprofessional personal testimony videos. One of members, Brandon Lewis,who works on their video production, had this to say about using lessthan professional videos:“Even if it's not the best quality, people love YouTube because so much of it is people just being real”So,it doesn’t matter whether you have a video budget of $10,000 or $10,your church can produce videos and post them on the web. Many churchesalready produce videos for other uses and many of those videos would beable to be digitized and posted on YouTube.I encourage you tostart considering how you can use video sharing to promote your churchonline and reach the lost for Christ. In the coming articles I willtalk about ways you can increase the benefits of posting your videosand give some ideas for videos you can produce.