5 Reasons Why I Say No To Creating Multiple Facebook Pages

If you’re involved in church communications, I can almost guarantee within the last month that one of these things has happened to you:

• Someone asked if they can create their own Facebook page for a ministry
• Someone didn’t even ask and you found out they created a Facebook page for their ministry

We all know that Facebook and social media can be an excellent way to promote, engage and encourage our audience. But it’s also something that we need to approach strategically, just like we would with any other ministry decision.

There are two types of strategies you can use for Facebook Pages:

• Centralized strategy with one page that focuses on church-wide content, but also includes ministry content.
• Scattered strategy that has one church-wide page, but also allows other ministries to create their own pages.

I know of some churches that are using a scattered page strategy successfully. I’ve personally used both strategies for managing social media for a church and have found the centralized strategy to produce better results. 

Here’s why my answer is almost always no to creating multiple pages for each ministry area in the church:

• Hard for the audience to keep up with –  A centralized page makes it simple for your audience to connect with you and be exposed to all that your church has to offer.
• Difficult to promote – Having one centralized page allows us to have one URL to promote for connecting with us on Facebook. Instead of diluting our efforts by promoting multiple pages, we can pour all of our energy into one Facebook page.
• Limits potential reach – As an example, our West Ridge Church Facebook page has over 7,000 page likes. If we share a status update about a ministry, the audience exposed to that content is larger than it would be if we had a separate page for each ministry that may only have 250-500 liking the page.
• Big responsibility to maintain – Is there someone who can daily commit to posting valuable content, monitor the page for comments and questions, and represent your church and brand well?
• Not a consistent need – How often do you need to engage your audience with new information? If it’s not more than 3-4x a week, then you’re better off communicating that information on a centralized page.

So what do you do when a ministry has content they’d like to share, but you tell them they can’t create their own page? Give them a channel to communicate through your centralized page. I’ve done that through allowing any ministry to submit posts on our communication request page. If you need help with a system for communication requests, check this post out. This social media request allows a ministry to post their suggested content and a requested post time. It’s then automatically sent to our social media volunteer team to edit and add to the queue. This has been very successful for us. Now ministries don’t have the burden of maintaining their own page and our audience is exposed to content from across our church instead of having to find it across multiple pages.

Question: What has your experience been with having a centralized Facebook page or multiple pages for your church? Leave a comment below!

UPDATE: I’ve added some additional thoughts and context in the comments below to add to the conversation.