Top 10 Social Media Tools for Churches

For a church, building out a strong digital brand can make all the difference when it comes to sustaining and growing your presence in your community. However, it’s not easy to do by hand. No matter how big your team is, or isn’t, having the right social media tools on hand will help you approach things with your best foot forward.

Here are the top 10 tools you should be using to manage your church’s social media presence across platforms.

1. Airtable

• Use it for: Planning your social media posts.

Airtable is a powerful planning tool with an excellent free plan. Think of it like a spreadsheet, but far better. You can include images, view things in a calendar format, and sort and filter as needed so you can break down your content plan based on hashtags, channel, or other characteristics. It even has templates to get you started quickly.

2. Later

• Use it for: Creating a visual content calendar.

While Airtable is great for planning content across platforms, Later is a powerful visual planning tool ideal for one of the most visual social media platforms out there: Instagram. Plus, Later allows you to schedule your content for publication (unlike Airtable) to help automate part of the process. The free plan even allows you up to 30 posts per profile.

3. Edgar

• Use it for: Making the most of your old posts.

Edgar is like a content scheduling tool, except far more powerful. The primary feature isn’t its ability to automatically post your content on a schedule; it’s the tool’s ability to create up to five variations of your content to help you stretch it out further. If you’re disappointed that only a small slice of your audience actually sees everything you post, Edgar will help you chip away at the gap while helping to fill in your content calendar month after month.

4. Feedly

• Use it for: Curating impactful content.

As a church, there’s a lot you need to keep up with. Maybe it’s the content of other churches in the area, or news within your community. You might also want to follow impactful podcasts, online sermons, and a variety of other content to help your church go further. Feedly is great because it helps you cut down on “information overload” while also helping you curate content your own followers may be interested in, helping you find the right things to share.

5. Pablo

• Use it for: Finding free graphics for your social posts.

If you have trouble with the visual aspect of your social media posts, Pablo is the tool for you. With a library of over 600,000 images (and growing) and easy-to-use editing tools, Pablo will help you create sharable images for your posts. Just take a few minutes out of each week and this tool will help you come up with graphics for every post in your calendar quickly.

6. Lnk.Bio

• Use it for: Adding pretty links to your Instagram posts.

If you’re familiar with Instagram, you likely know the struggle of link restrictions. Most users find it frustrating that they can’t include links in their Instagram posts, and constantly saying “link in bio” can make for a confusing mess. Lnk.Bio looks to solve the linking issue on Instagram by enabling users to include multiple links in their bio. It makes for a clean linking experience that’s visually appealing and more helpful to your followers, allowing you to drive traffic to your website and elsewhere easily.

7. Zapier

• Use it for: Social media automation.

Do you want to make a Twitter post sharing a link every time you publish on your blog? Do you want to get an email when someone comments on that urgent announcement on Facebook? Zapier is the do-it-all automation tool that you need. If your church isn’t already using Zapier, you’ll easily come up with a hundred uses for it within a few moments of exploring this powerful tool. With a simple “If This Then That” setup, you can connect email accounts, social media pages, and more to help automate your church’s repetitive tasks.

8. Buffer

• Use it for: Scheduling content across platforms.

Often referred to as the best social media scheduling tool around, Buffer combines multiple tools into one, which is ideal for the church that wants to simplify its processes and use just a couple core platforms. With Buffer, you can plan, schedule, and monitor your content. However, the free plan is limited to one user, three channels, and 10 posts at any given time, so your church will very well have to upgrade to a paid plan.

9. HootSuite

• Use it for: Managing your social pages in one dashboard.

Similar to Buffer, HootSuite will help you manage all of your social media pages in one place. However, it offers some added tools you may find very useful — like the discovery feature that helps you see who’s talking about your church. This can be useful in engaging with followers new and old, and building your community over time.

10. Everypost

• Use it for: Posting to all social channels from your iPhone.

If you happen to use an iPhone, Everypost is a powerful tool that simply can’t be left off of this list. While it’s ideal to post unique content to each of your social platforms rather than duplicating content across the web, Everypost simplifies things when you need to get a specific message out quickly and across all channels. Think urgent donation requests, volunteering opportunities, or another announcement that you want everyone to hear as soon as possible. Everypost will help you get the word out.

Build Your Church’s Online Community

Here at DonorWerx, we believe building a strong digital presence is paramount to the success of the modern church. Of course, we know it can be difficult. Every day, we help coach church leaders just like you in the likes of social media management and building an online presence that resonates with supporters.

Interested in learning more? Schedule a 30-minute discovery call and we’ll walk you through some customized strategies to help you engage your followers and get more donations at the same time.