Two things people want from you online, pastor

The big question for a lot of church leaders who now find themselves playing the role of digital content creators centers on getting people to see their content. What kind of digital content are people looking for?

Our online behavior is generally self-focused. When we’re surfing, scrolling, or consuming digital content, we are able to do so without a sense that someone is looking over our shoulders and judging our clicks. (Someone probably is looking at our clicks, but it’s just so they can sell us more stuff. Anyways…) The anonymity of the digital realm allows us to pursue a lot more self-interest. That means that our expectations for the kind of content we want to encounter online are different. Our expectations for digital content are very self-centered.

So what kind of content gets clicks and eyeballs? Well, for the most part, the answer is that people are looking for content that is about them. So, as we now create content for leading people on spiritual journeys and building spiritual communities, we’ll want to keep in mind that the eyes falling onto our content pieces are often, unintentionally, selfishly motivated.

So here are two key ideas to keep in mind as we try to connect with people in the digital realm.

First, people want to learn something about themselves.

Remember the fun we had doing online quizzes which promised to reveal what Hogwarts house we belonged to? Or what our spirit animal is? The heyday of online quizzes may have passed, but the driving motivation behind the popularity of these quizzes remains. We want to learn or experience something for ourselves.

For spiritual content creators, this implies that we create content with the consumer in mind. The central question our content is seeking to answer is “what’s in it for them?” Sounds selfish, I know. But this is the kind of question lurking at the back of our minds when we’re consuming content online. Content that does not quickly reveal the benefit to the user often gets skipped over.

Ministers have important ideas to communicate. Truthfully, though, we in the ministry world overlook the step of communicating why the ideas we have to communicate are important. Digital content consumption behaviors call us back to communicating a “why” before we communicate the “what”.

Primarily, we connect with content that reveals to us how we can survive and thrive in one of three areas: wealth, health, relationships. In our sphere of influence, we may want to add “spiritual” in front of those categories. So the content we create seeks to answer questions about spiritual wealth (which may be the accumulation of knowledge), spiritual health (spiritual practices), and spiritual relationships (the community of faith).

The bottom line is that a best practice would be to quickly reveal to people what the benefit of this piece of content is for them, and then quickly deliver that benefit.

Second, people want a personal guide

People need people–even online. When we comb through social media feeds for minutes on end, we’re impulsively searching for a personal connection to someone else. Pastors, we can be that someone else. But only if we get out from behind the masks of our institutional brands and show our faces and reveal our hearts.

This implies that when we’re producing content on behalf of an institution–like a church or ministry–then we not be shy about revealing that this content was made by an actual human being with a name, face, preferences, hobbies, etc… We don’t want to hijack our content to make it all about us. But we do want to add a personal touch–because our people are hoping to build a connection with us. Show yourself in your content, whether that be by mentioning some personal interests, or planting some interesting hobby items in the backdrop of a video, or by placing yourself in a story.

Related to this, we can personalize our content by addressing the consumer. Invite them into the content. Ask them questions. And remember, when it comes to digital content, you are talking to one person, not an audience. Practices that help establish this personal connection include looking into the camera for videos, not being shy about using “you” in writing, avoiding group terms like “all of us here” or “you all” (because, most likely, this content is being consumed by a solitary person sitting at her desk or on his couch).

The big invitation is to be personal and authentically human. You know how to do that!

What are we looking for when we’re online?