TikTok Tips for Churches

Today we're going to talk about what your church can be doing on TikTok to make an impact in the TikTok community. Are you ready? Because it's time.

You're listening to the Church Digital Sidekick Podcast, part of the TCD Podcast Network.

Hey heroes, my name is Tom Pounder and this is the Church Digital Sidekick Podcast. This is a podcast where I bring on ministry leaders and we talk about how you can do ministry more effectively in this very digital and online world. And today I'm bringing back a guest that I've had on before. Her name is Sammy Kelly. She works for Digi Evangelism and they do lots of great stuff, but she's also a video editor and she's got her own side business as well as a video editor. We're going to talk about all that kind of stuff in the interview, but she is someone who's really experimenting and really encouraging TikTok. She's been doing different things on TikTok and she gives lots of great insights for churches on what they can be doing on TikTok to be making an impact all over the world. So we're gonna have a conversation with her about what churches can do right now on TikTok. But before we do that, I want to highlight thechurch.digital. If you've never checked out thechurch.digital, go to that. That's the website. But at thechurch.digital, we've got tons of different podcasts, tons of different blogs. We've got coaching. We've got cohorts. All those things that are happening at thechurch.digital. And it's just an amazing opportunity for you if you work with digital ministry. online ministry, if you work with digital ministry, if you work with metaverse ministry, we've got encouragement and inspiration for you every single day at thechurch.digital. So if you've never checked it out, go today and check out thechurch.digital to be encouraged and inspired in your digital ministry. All right, so now let's get into the interview with Sammy Kelly, talk about what churches can do on TikTok. All right, with me right now is Sammy Kelly. Sammy, how are you?

Hey, Tom, good to be here.

I'm glad you're well. I'm so glad that you're here. Again, I've been trying to track you down for months upon months upon months, and you are busy, busy, busy. so we'll get into why you've been so busy in a second but let's get into just your background a little bit you've been on the podcast before and we interact a lot on twitter which i'm glad you're active on twitter um but uh for anybody who may not know who you are why don't you give a quick little bio who you are and what you do

sure so my biggest connection i think with you and your work has been through digivangelism of which i'm a co-owner of with michelle barra and uh we help progressive leaders of spiritual communities share hope healing and light online and as i was just talking with you about we've been doing a lot of that for free for the past uh year and a half and just pumping out you know weekly youtube uh educational content and we're posting a lot on instagram and tick tock and all that good stuff and and i've you know developed some uh ways people can work with us now beyond just the free content but a lot of it's been that and it's been great getting to know people along the way and being able to help faith leaders just really reach people online which is where they're spending time so i i do a lot of that and i also as i said i have another hat where i'm a video editor i have a company doing that and so i love video i love social um i also love being outside i'm not always on my computer i'm a big outdoors person so that's that's a lot about me that's great what what what got you into video editing like what what drew you there Yeah, and that's actually a good tangent here because I do have a background in ministry. And so I wouldn't say ministry was the first place where I was into video editing. I like to joke that from the second I knew I could make videos about my dogs when I was like in middle school, it was like I was sold because I love dogs. But then I started using that in ministry. I would make videos for our youth group. We'd go on a trip and I'd want to make a video. you know, explaining what we did for the mission trip or whatever, sharing with the congregation. And then as I started working with the church in youth ministry, parish ministry, and even denominational ministry locally, I was able to use that gift to do testimony videos, all sorts of things. I've always loved it. I just love when you get the video together and you just center in and focus and bring it to life and communicate something in ways that Twitter can't always do without video.

Yeah, that's awesome. Let's date ourselves a little bit here. When you were making your first videos in middle school, what kind of camera were you using? Did you have one of those home video cameras that was on your shoulder and then you had to take the VHS tape into something else or is that just me?

um you know when i was like in elementary school i think my parents would set that up in the hallway and my friends and i would like do little plays and stuff but i didn't edit those no i was working with i think they still had sd cards um middle school but it was like an old not good quality camera you know and i don't even know what program i was using something free on a big boxy computer so i'm not quite as dated but a little bit

OK, so now let's move to today. What are you using right now to edit your videos?

yeah so i use premiere pro as far as video editing for clients um and some of the digi stuff will do youtube videos um when it comes to tick tock which i know we want to get into as well um i will i've actually moved on to the phone more there's a free program cap cut i don't know if you're familiar if you use that um a lot of people you will use it for free captions to put captions on the video and you can you know post it on multiple platforms without you know manually putting captions on each one as you upload it yeah i haven't been using it for captions but i have been using it for clipping the footage and i love it because it's right on the phone i get it done like kind of move it on to the next phase um yeah and certainly tick tock has its own editing capabilities i just prefer to do it outside of tick tock and then upload it

That's awesome. Okay. So since you mentioned TikTok, let's move into our topic because part of the reason why Sammy has just been pushing me off for so long is she said, Tom, I'm doing a lot of different things on TikTok. Let's talk about TikTok after I get done experimenting and talk about doing all this stuff. And so now that you're done, well, you're probably not done experimenting, but you're at that place where we can catch up and chat. Let's talk about TikTok right now. What is it? What is it that you love about TikTok in general?

I'm going to apologize for the sirens here. They'll be gone shortly. But I love about TikTok that there's not this need to be showy and polished and perfect. And I work with some folks that I'm trying to make an advertisement for them and they want it to look good and they want it to be polished it is but but on tiktok you can just show up you you show up as you and certainly you want to think ahead about what you're doing if there's there's some there's some science to it as far as a good hook in a video because you need to capture people's attention quickly and uh you want the video to you want to be able to hear you you want to be able to see your face clear like there's some things you still got to consider you can't just kind of you know take your phone out while you're still in bed and hope for the best uh but the segment you don't need to think too much about um what what's going on as long as you you present yourself in a way that can be seen and heard um it's just you you show up as you and share your thoughts and people like love that on the platform that's what the problem is built for

Yeah, I think you're right on that because one of the things I love about it and I'll say I think people are very authentic on this. They get on there and they share. And I love what you said. It's not polished, but I don't care. I think. In COVID, I think before COVID, I think everyone thought the mindset we have to have everything polished, it has to be perfect, it has to be all this stuff. But what we discovered over COVID and through apps like TikTok and live video is that people don't need it to be polished. They just want you to be real and authentic. And I see a lot of that happen. I see a lot of people sharing their stories and people getting encouragement. I see a lot of hope in the app and that's what really draws me to it.

yeah yeah i love that you mentioned story because it really it does come down to storytelling like that's almost like the science i was mentioning you got to be able to captivate people but most ministry leaders are already kind of used to that with you know preaching sermons or doing short talks or whatever um and as long as you can educate people entertain people or inspire people you just show up and do that and it's pretty it's it's uh

you know it's open it's accessible that's what i'm looking for for for everybody as long as you have a phone that can do that do you ever sit on tick tock and just get sucked down the rabbit hole and find yourself like an hour later like oh my gosh i gotta go to bed

yes all the time um yeah and i think it's so fascinating too because i'm sure your listeners already know by now but the algorithm of tick tock is just so advanced and it will it will read you now certainly you can train it by telling it what you do or do not want to see um but it it just gets to know know the intimate uh things about you that you find interesting based on how you interact with the videos to the point where some of my closest friends and i will they're on tick tock too and like we'll get together and and mention a trend like i'll reference a trend and you know say the little song piece or whatever and they'll look at me like what are you saying? And I'm like, oh, it's on TikTok. It's all over my algorithm. It's every other video for the past three months. And they're like, oh, I've never seen that. So there's these niche like things happening that, you know, unless you're someone like me that is running, like I run 10, 50 miles because I'm training for this half marathon and marathon. So I get all these people like filming mile by mile updates. So unless you're into that, you're not going to see any of that. You're going to see, I don't know, guitars perhaps reading,

from behind you there tom yeah it's not my guitar but yes it's yeah but or you could see like i i get sucked into the food ones oh i mean there's some like some different meat specialist guys there's some different grill specialist guys And I'm like, man, these are these are like fascinating. But you're right. You get sucked into it. And it's very smart. The algorithm changes and it goes like it's funny because I'll I'll be on one set of algorithm and I'll know that I'm on the food stuff. And then I hear different stories like testimonies. I click on one or two testimonies. I'm like, oh, my gosh, this is awesome. And then I'll see a bunch of divorce stories. I'm divorced and I'm like looking at the stories and interacting. And then I go through. And so.

tiktok is it changes for me all the time depending on what i'm liking and engaging with right and i don't get uh most of those and so like for me you know i have my own things that pop up and it's just amazing how intricate it is and and i i hope that that would give people some kind of like confidence or hope that whatever you're putting out there there's gonna be a group of people that are gonna get it to show up on your for you page and resonate with them

Yeah. Okay, so you've been doing a lot of experimenting, a lot of encouragement. Again, one of the things I love about what you do on TikTok is that you share encouragement on how churches can use TikTok. So in all the things that you've been learning and doing, what are some tips that you would encourage churches to do as they're getting into TikTok? Because I think every church should be on TikTok. If you're on Instagram Reels, at least, you should surely be on TikTok.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, a couple things come to mind. First of all, it works. So when you do it, you're going to get outreach. You're going to get new eyes. You're going to get new followers. It's just a matter sometimes of doing it and committing it to your schedule. And this is where I can reference our intensive TikTok experiment we did when you first contacted me and I said, hey, let's wait until after we do this three videos a day for 30 days thing that we were doing and see if we have anything to report on. um that was a lot to manage like i won't lie it's a lot to keep up with but we certainly our account certainly grew and and that's not even the most important thing for us we we connected with a lot more people which i i'm excited about you know when we get a bunch of followers and i start seeing like reverent this person or you know youth pastor this person i'm like oh the algorithm is getting like the right people on our stuff we're helping the people we want to serve so that's everything to us you know that's why we do this um but i also will say it works but don't burn yourself out you know you gotta know what you're committing what you can commit to and and i'm i'm uh speaking to myself here too because you know it's a constant uh you know give and take that you have to figure out is this too much uh for me because i did three videos whatever 30 days and then i missed two weeks because it was just too much uh so pacing yourself in a reasonable way i would say if your church can do two a week

a week four a week do what you can do um well i can keep going but i'll pause yeah yeah because i i think that's the thing i because i've read a stat saying hey if you really want to get big on tick tock you got to post like that two to three times a day and i'm like a day i i can't even do two or three times a week my my goal for my church is three times a week that i want to do that so like am i going to be penalized if i don't do it that often what do you think about that

don't think you'll be penalized i think that if you do more you would probably be rewarded uh because like i said the more content you're putting out there the more touch points yeah but you also want to keep the quality of your videos and make sure like we said you're storytelling you're entertaining you're informing people you're not just uh showing up and saying like hey it's me here i am goodbye like there's nothing there's not a lot of value there yeah um yeah yeah the other thing i wanted to say with that is being organized when you're pumping out content like that can be really helpful and again this is something i've you know been trying different ways of basically project management. And everybody, every leader is going to have their own social media organization for them. But I'll just say that we started using Notion recently. I don't know if you're familiar with that. And I love it. We were using Trello to plan what kind of content we were going to be pushing out or teaching that we were talking about. But notion just there's a nice way I think of, you know, making your list, your, your planned list of content turn into a calendar turn into this turn into that, that I just am like, this is very visually helpful for my brain. So perhaps that will be helpful to some of your listeners, as long as you have something that works for you, though, so that you can plan ahead a little like do you plan ahead with your three times a week or do you just kind of say it's monday i gotta post the tick tock what am i gonna do

well yeah so it's it's a little bit of give or take so i know certain content that i want to push like for instance i i i take my sermon or the sermon that this sermon guy does the preacher does and i'll cut up in the clips and i try to take one minute clips from there and then use those so i like to post those once a week i like to see if we can post a worship song once every other week um if we have a baptism i like to post that and so i i don't have a plan i should have a plan i don't but i have certain things i know i want to post that's good which will let's lead into that then are there certain things that you should be posting like what kind of things could you be posting again if you're talking about a content calendar and mapping things out what are some things that churches could post about

sure uh and i think this answers that question but it's also a comment on what you just said as far as because you're asking am i going to be penalized for just doing three times a week that sort of thing um here's something that i've kind of picked up that's been really helpful and it might apply it might not depending on if you get comments on your videos so as you probably know you can reply to a comment with a video and so an easy what i've found to be kind of an easy video to put out there without much planning or really much ever even in recording itself could be just to reply to the comment uh whatever they're saying. Maybe they're asking a question like, oh, what's that behind the baptismal font? I don't know. It's just something that you're like, hey, thanks for asking. Here's the answer to that question or here's what we believe about this or whatever. You're engaging that comment. But it also, when you post that video, if you leave that little comment sticker bubble thing that pops up there, it will redirect to that other video as well. So people can say, oh, what's... what is he answering about he made a video answering about what was in the back of the sanctuary there but i don't even oh oh it's that other video oh now i'm on this other video of his and now i'm kind of going down a rabbit hole of compounders with uh tick tocks or your church yeah i always wondered how that happened okay so that's how that happens so yeah so just yeah reply it with a video and then that's how it goes okay that makes a lot of sense now yeah and it's it's it's such and i'm telling you such a nice like oh i got a video done and all i had to do was you know and sometimes i just say like thank you or or i'm just you know saying this is a great comment like highlighting what they're saying like let's say you're talking about a specific youth ministry thing and someone comments and says oh i've done this and then you just make a video replying to that saying this is a fantastic idea everybody should go do it then it's like you've made a video and it didn't take much ever so i think when you're asking about what kind of things people should be doing as a repeated uh education is always good you know entertaining is fine too and inspiration uh encouraging people that's all good um but also take those little wins where you can find them if if it's a reply to a comment that's what it is if it's a you know just giving someone like showing them what you're up to that day something that's relatable i would say make a quick video about that or or keep them short like these are their little wins like that 10 second oh i just thought of this while i was driving quick make a tick tock and say did you ever think about this because i was just thinking about this yeah and there it is

I love what you just said, the quick little wins that you can take and use that and grow from it. Again, I think a lot of times churches are like, well, we've got all this content. We got to just share it. And they don't form it correctly. They don't utilize TikTok for all it's worth. But I also think that they, again, like what we talked about before, they feel like it has to be professionally done when it really doesn't have to be so polished or professionally done. You had just said something and I totally just, I lost my mind about one of those wins that you had, but it's going to come back to me and I'm going to remember.

Driving your car.

no comment no behind the scenes oh no this was it oh good see there you go um trends tick tock trends lots of them yes should churches do them i would say so i would say

maybe not the entire feed like every video you make you could make it a trend if that's what you're going for and you just want to you know play with the trends and show up on tick tock in that way but i'm also assuming that you as a church if you're on tick tock you're online anyway you have a mission you have a reason for being online you know you want to encourage people you want to love people you want to help people now can you do that through the trends absolutely so as long as you're you're connecting the trends to what you're doing that's good stuff but there's probably going to be other times where you're going to want to show up and tell people a little about you you know often when you're doing trends you're not speaking to the camera as much you know maybe it's a song that's playing and you're doing a motion or something um you can still tell a lot through the text on the screen but it's it's good for people to hear your voice too and see your face kind of normal from time to time but not all the time so that's my thought

Yeah, I agree. I think you're right. Again, you don't probably don't want your entire feed to be all of the trends and everything, but there are cool trends. Like, you know, there was one that the Celine Dion singing baby, baby, baby, and all, all these moms. And then even some guys were doing things and they were just, they were just these fun, elaborate things. And I'm like, this is fun. If we want our church, like one of our, you know, one of our core values at our church is joy. And we want to communicate joy and fun out of that. And so that would fit our church. Now, if your church is not about joy, which I hope it's about joy, you know, but like you may not want to do it. But I think if it fits your culture, I think definitely dump on a trend that's happening. I think that's good.

Yeah, absolutely. And I've been really loving seeing churches do that. And even small churches, I think for a little while. Maybe smaller churches were intimidated. They're just not sure what to do about TikTok. But in the past few months, I've seen more and more small, you know, one person or one staff member church or very small staff churches, small churches get on TikTok and just say, this is who we are. This is what we're about.

Yeah.

Play along with the trends and, and they're, they're reaching people. And some of my favorites, you were mentioning like the sermon clips. I think that is a huge, huge, easy win. You know, it's not easy because you still have to go in. You have to record the sermon. You have to get the videos. You have to cut the clips. You have to put them on. Like, that's not easy. That takes time and effort and energy, but. getting your message out to so many more people and a lot of these little churches that are doing this are seeing some viral hits now it's not gonna happen every time but if the possibility is there and you're you're gonna get a lot more reach for it anyway i i find that worth the effort

Yeah, see, you don't need to be like one of these big mega church pastors to get your voice out there. You can share truth and God's truth and encourage people and it could go viral. And again, not that you want to make it about being viral, but hey, if you're viral, that means more people are hearing about God. And that's what you want. You want more people to hear about Jesus. And I love that. Okay, so let me ask you this question. Is it good for a church to be a business? profile or a kind of a personal profile have you found one way that works better or another

uh i think they just changed something with that and i'm trying to remember what it is i thought it was just creator and business or creator and professional now or or maybe they added creator um so sorry if i can't give you a clear answer on that i don't think there's anything wrong with being like a creator who can use some of um some of those those sounds that maybe businesses or companies can't always access because they kind of block off some sounds and some trending audios. Yeah. So, but that's one of those things that they're always, TikTok is always kind of changing and adapting same with Instagram to try to, because they recognize that there are all these different types of entities and people on the apps.

yeah no that's good i i made our church a business account and the one frustrating thing for us is i can't use some of the sounds yeah a lot of sounds that's been like that's been frustrating i'm like did i make a mistake doing that and and i kind of go back and forth of

you can change it too if you wanted to to try that out or you know i can't give you legal advice for that but yeah see what others are doing as far as that um i think there might be a difference between when you get a like a link in your bio yeah ability as well

that is with the business and that's part of the reason why i chose to do the business things to get a link because ultimately i wanted to link back to some of our other content or even our church website just in case people are curious um all right so a few more what what are what is another tip or so that you would encourage us with uh another tip um

I, you know, this is something recent that I've been doing differently. So when people would ask us inevitably, because we talk about all sorts of social media about like what to do when you get a bad comment, because that comes up all the time. at first it would i've always like educated people and said well you you have control uh and this is still true you can delete the comment if you want on other platforms you can hide the comment if you want them not to know that you kind of hid it from everyone so they're not like oh they deleted my comment i'm gonna leave 12 more like you have some control there um but recently i've been hearing more about well sometimes your more controversial uh topics or or just things that bring out the trolls can help you by giving you kind of a boost because people start to like kind of discuss that in your comment section or reflect on like wow that was just a weird comment that person left and so uh maybe leave those comments at least for a day or two i mean if it's really like hateful on you or another person i would say just delete it like you don't need that negativity um but if it's just something that's maybe different than your perspective and you are okay with there being a little bit of dialogue you can engage it or you can you can let it sit and let other people kind of interact with it for a bit but that's just something new i've been kind of playing around with and see and we get that all the time with digital ministry uh you know people are always saying well the church needs to be in person what are you doing online stop telling them to get on the internet it's like okay

Oh, yeah. Okay. Don't even get me started on that. But I will say I like that perspective of the troll stuff is because the more people are commenting on it, again, even if it's negative, it gets your thing exposed a little bit more, which could create good conversation. And again, I think it's all about conversations. And again, you have the choice to respond in kind, even if people are hateful. and again i i think we we have the opportunity to communicate sky love no matter what people are saying and so that's a really interesting perspective i i like that um thankfully our videos are not that popular that we get a ton of trolls yeah i know yeah i know um so um but no this is this is awesome um all right one last thought for for us sarah what what how else would you encourage us

Yeah, I've got one more thing coming to mind here. And that is, I referenced it before, but I really want to highlight the fact that you need to capture people's attention really quickly on TikTok. The first three seconds is generally what I'm hearing. And as much as I'm excited about seeing more small churches and pastors and faith leaders in general getting on TikTok, and I've seen that more and more in the past few months, I'm also seeing it used incorrectly when it comes to the hook a lot because pastors are like okay i'm making a tick tock i'm showing up online i'm doing a good thing you are that's great but it's not gonna work it's not gonna get nearly the reach that you could be getting if you show up and hold the camera in front of your face and are like oh hey like i mean you felt that pause right i only paused for like a second and a half but it was like that was that was some time and i'm seeing that i've seen the like hey everybody i just wanted to show up today like no start with the start with the the exactly what you're going to talk to people about like what's one sentence even if that's the only thing you think about before you film your tick tock what is this one thing that i'm that i'm going to share with them or that they're going to come away with and if you can start there and then you can do the by the way i'm sammy i'm here with you if you got to do that you got to do that but it's it's that first three seconds

yes see i i agree with you 100 and that's something that's you know we have different people producing different kinds of content for us and that's great and the reality is you have to hook them i mean it's like the whole part of storytelling is that if you don't hook them early like you said three seconds and this is the same thing with youtube if you don't hook them early they're going to be out and they don't they don't have time for that because it's such a fast-paced thing all they do is for tick tock just swipe up swipe up swipe up you know so hook them early i think that's a great comment on that um well sammy this has been awesome you've got a lot of experience you got a lot of skills on this area tell us how people can connect with you and share about digivangelism and also your video editing stuff too

Oh, that's nice of you to ask. So Digivangelism is easy because it's digivangelism.org or digivangelism at every platform pretty much you're going to be on. And we show up a lot on, like I said, weekly on YouTube, on our blogs that go on our website, and then Instagram fairly often. And of course, TikTok. I also want to point out, we do have a free TikTok guide that might be helpful for some of your listeners. digivangelism.org backslash TikTok.

i think it's pretty simple like that and so they can download it's got you know hook examples church leaders to follow things people can do as a church on tiktok like linkedin it so we're very excited about providing that to people and it's been good um good no well real quick i'll include all her links on the show notes so make just click the show notes and include that ebook too um that will be or the resource that will be helpful so continue sammy

yeah yeah yeah so there's a lot on the site i'll let you kind of let your listeners click around there if they need like digital communications reviews or walkthroughs or anything like that we've got some services listed there uh and then thank you for asking about the video editing i honestly don't talk about this like Nearly ever, but as I was telling you before we got on here, recently revamped my website with video editing. And so I'm actually excited about sharing it now. And so it's still in the process of some tweaks, but it's called VidBridge Editing Solutions, and the site is vidbridgesolutions.com. So that's V-I-D, bridge solutions. And it's not like just churches that we help with video editing, but it is focused on. organizations that empower people to love themselves live intentionally and better the world around them so that's what i do vidbridge and uh digi and thank you again for asking you're probably the first podcast that i'm actually sharing that on so yeah i'm first first of many but first yeah that's awesome no that's great because again video is so powerful

today and again whether you're a small church or a big church you need to be producing some sort of videos in some sort of format and so again sammy's been in this space for a really long time and i would highly recommend you talk with her she can encourage you in a lot of different ways sammy's a great resource um that i would love for you to connect with um as you're going about your ministry and getting into video stuff uh sammy final question for you what what's your favorite social platform right now oh i might have to go with tick tock which is a big change over the past few months because instagram has been it okay neither of those answers are acceptable you have the wrong answer it's twitter twitter twitter

should have known no just kidding no i no that's great okay so you're you're more of an instagram and tick tock person oh yeah for sure i and i i part of me is like oh i think instagram might be my favorite but i like tick tock more than i like instagram reels and i think that those two platform like reels and tick tock are just yeah i love video so i love that i go twitter tick tock

and then it all gets jumbled okay there you go so okay well sammy as always it's great having you on so thanks so much for taking time to talk to me today thank you for having me it's always good to see you All right, so what did you think of the interview? I love having Sammy on. She's been on the podcast before. She's just great with doing online ministry and digital stuff, so check out her stuff on the show notes. I've got all the links on there as well. She's got great encouragement and inspiration, and I love just seeing her stuff on TikTok. It encourages me. I'm trying to figure out TikTok for me and my church. And it's just some of the things that she's doing and encouragement she's given has just been very helpful. So I would love to hear from you. What did you find encouraging or what questions do you have about TikTok for churches? Definitely put it in the comment section below or you can hit us up on Twitter. I'm on Twitter. Sammy's on Twitter. Again, you can find her links. Mine is at TAPounder is Twitter. And let's carry on this conversation. I bet you Sammy and I would love to just continue this conversation and talk more about what churches can do on TikTok on Twitter. So we'd love to talk to you a little bit more about that. Again, or you can put a simple comment in the comment section below. We'd love to do that. All right, heroes, well, thank you so much for being with us today. As always, if you enjoyed the podcast, you can subscribe to it. This is on YouTube. This is on iTunes and Spotify, as well as thechurch.digital. I would love for you to check that out and subscribe to it. We've got new podcasts every single week. We'd love for you to be a part of that today. All right, heroes, well, I hope you have a great rest of your week, and until next time, have a great one.