People are becoming more visual than textual these days.
This fact is evident in the way users of social media engage with posts. They communicate more with videos and images while posts that contain just text have fewer engagements.
There are so many reasons why your church needs to start paying more attention to creating engaging videos. For example, you need to accommodate the average human attention span that has dropped considerably over the years. Another reason is to make it easier for followers to understand sermons.
How to Create More Engaging Church Videos
When people watch engaging church videos, they enjoy them and share them. If you try looking back over the last month, you should have seen at least one Christian viral video. Usually, when you watch such videos produced by a church, you tend to remember the church with more ease. The question here is, “how can you create more engaging videos for your church?” Check below for a few suggestions.
Be natural and comfortable
Have you seen those church videos that it seems like the people in the video aren’t interested in what they are doing? It looks like they would prefer doing something else instead of shooting the video. Those kinds of videos are unlikely to hold anyone’s attention from beginning to end.
A typical example is a funny and jovial pastor that looks so shy and stiff in his videos. It looks like he is so careful not to make an error or to crack too many jokes so he doesn’t offend anyone. In the end, he isn’t comfortable with what he is doing and is overly self-conscious. Such videos throw off the audience before they get to the crux of the matter.
If you know that you wouldn’t be comfortable in front of the camera, let someone else do it for you. You can also make use of voice-overs so that you don’t have to appear in the videos.
Keep your videos short
Although, keeping your videos short may not be possible all the time, try to follow this unwritten rule. To be honest, we are in a fast-paced world and people want to finish watching your video and move on quickly. As such, you must pass your message across very quickly before they lose interest.
A simple rule to follow here is, “make the video as long as it needs to be to pass the message.” The keyword here is “need.” When you focus on this, it is easy to decide the length of your videos. For example, an announcement video should pass all the announcements quickly and can be completed in five minutes. On the other hand, a sermon video has to be the full duration of the sermon. You can choose to create excerpts of your sermons for social media so that people can watch them quickly and get the message.
The secret behind keeping videos short is that people get to remember them with more ease. Also, it is more convenient for someone to watch a two-minute video instead of a ten-minute video.
Make use of captions
Videos are great and many of us love them. However, there are places where watching videos is just inappropriate. An example is a library where you need to be very quiet or you’d be disturbing others. Watching a video here will be highly inconsiderate except you have headphones.
You can make it easier for your target audience to watch your church videos anywhere by using captions. With captions, viewers can turn down the sound and still enjoy the videos. This way, you can watch your videos in places where they should be quiet and in very noisy environments. Of course, using captions in your videos means more work but when you look at the results, it is worth the stress.
Choose a specific purpose for your videos
You shouldn’t make videos just for the sake of putting up something online. If you have done this before now, this is a good time to stop.
Every video that you create must have a specific purpose driving it. People shouldn’t watch your videos and wonder what they just watched. Make the purpose of each video obvious so that viewers can explain to others what the message is with ease. To achieve this, you should outline each video on paper before shooting.
Invite your audience to take action
What comes next after people watch your church videos? Once you have a specific purpose for your videos, there should be a call to action at the end.
There are so many things that you can do in this regard. Examples include inviting them to read certain Bible verses, visit a website, be nicer to people, etc. Inviting your audience to take action makes them feel like you are giving them more value so they want to come back.
Conclusion
These are just five ways to create more engaging church videos. What other methods do you know? Share them with us in the comments section. Meanwhile, check out ChurchPad for features to help improve church administration and communication.