Every church wants to increase engagement and membership, but how? If you haven’t embraced video yet, you’re missing out on a great opportunity.
For churches still on the fence about whether it’s worth the time and effort, church video statistics don’t lie. As you’ll see, video is the future. While it will never completely replace text, it’s a critical component in marketing your church and engaging with your audience.
As the shift toward video continues, now is a great time to start implementing a video strategy for your church.
Videos Matter For Engagement And Marketing
When you think of videos online, you might think about those silly YouTube videos and challenges. However, if you dig deeper, even YouTube is filled with educational and useful content that people love.
Videos aren’t mindless entertainment, but an effective way to engage with people. For your church, it’s a way to help better connect them with their faith even when they can’t attend services. If someone’s having a hard time, they can watch your videos and feel better.
They’re also a major marketing tool. And yes, you do have to market your church to help it grow. More than ever, people want to see a church in action before attending in person. Your videos aren’t just for your online audience, but for showing potential new visitors whether your church is a good fit for them.
There are numerous types of videos your church can create, such as tutorials, mini-services, announcements, welcome messages, Bible study, Q&As and much more. We even recommend adding video to some of your main church website pages to better reach visitors.
The good news is engaging church videos aren’t that hard to create. All you really need is a smartphone and/or laptop with a webcam. While you can buy higher-end equipment, things you already have are enough to get you started.
Live streaming Extends Your Reach
One of the more popular types of videos for churches is live streaming. For some churches, you may not live stream, but you do upload your sermons after you finish each week. Church video statistics show that live streaming extends your reach.
If you think live streaming hurts your attendance, statistics say otherwise. In fact, Rocky River United Methodist Church gained several new families in just a few months after live streaming services for the first time.
Even though church attendance may be down overall, 44% of people say they prefer to worship alone. This means they still want a church, but they just don’t like going to church. Live streaming helps you reach that 44%. They’ll still engage with you online and may even recommend you to friends and family.
Video Can Increase Online Tithing
In the past few years, many of our church statistics have focused on tithing. You can check out our 2019 and 2020 statistics for more.
The general consensus is people prefer to give online. It’s easy and they can even set up recurring payments so they don’t forget. Plus, there’s no one judging them based on how much they put in the collection plate.
Video helps you better connect with people online, making them more likely to tithe than if they just read text. When Champions Centre started using Livestream, they increased digital donations by 70%. That’s just from live streaming.
Adding videos to show what you’re church is doing for the community or showing a family in need is highly effective for increasing online tithing.
Video Brings More People Together
More churches have had to turn to alternative worship methods since the coronavirus pandemic broke out. However, this isn’t all bad. In fact, it’s shown many churches that video helps bring more people together.
In March 2020, when many churches were first trying to reach their members, Life.Church’s Church Online Platform streamed services to over 4.7 million devices. One week later, that number jumped to 7 million.
Even when people can’t attend church, video helps bring them together to still worship as a community. People enjoy the engagement. It’s as close to being there as you can get without actually being there.
People Prefer Watching Videos
People love watching videos. In fact, they enjoy them even more than watching TV. 60% of people prefer online video platforms over TV.
If you’re trying to target the 18-49 demographic, you should know that 80% of them watch YouTube every month. YouTube is a great free platform to add your church videos. That same demographic’s TV watching dropped by 4%, but YouTube usage increased by 74%.
Video is so popular that one Facebook executive said video would replace text on Facebook by 2021. While that probably won’t be the case, if you scroll through Facebook, you’ll definitely see far more video and images than text.
Not only are videos more engaging overall, but it’s easier to watch than read. Even if your video is nothing more than you talking and showing slides of texts and images, people will watch that over sitting down and reading a longer blog post.
You shouldn’t give up blogging, though. Text isn’t disappearing, but combining text and video is a fool-proof church marketing strategy when done right.
Get Your Message Across Better
Church video statistics aren’t just about marketing, though. The messages you share with others are important. You want people to remember them. While text gets the message across, it’s not always the most effective.
Go ahead and ask a few members to read a recent blog post and then quiz them. Now, create a video sharing the same information. Ask members questions after they watch the video. The ones who watch the video almost always do better at answering questions because the brain processes the information easier.
People retain as much as 95% of what they watch versus only 10% of what they read. If you want a more effective worship and teaching tool, you can’t get much better than video outside of actually going to church.
Videos Get Shared More Often
Word-of-mouth is still one of the best church marketing tools. People always trust reviews from people they know over random ads. Word-of-mouth still exists online. Just think of how many videos, memes and links people share on social media.
If you’re looking to expand your reach, this might be one of the most important church video statistics so far – 92% of people share videos that they watch on their mobile devices.
It’s also important to note that over half of all online videos are watched on mobile devices. So, make sure you’re using a platform that’s mobile compatible. There’s a reason why YouTube is the second only to Google in terms of daily visitors. If you have church videos on your website, ensure your site is mobile-friendly.
YouTube Helps Solve Problems
While YouTube is great for watching funny cat videos, it’s also the platform that 70% of users turn to to get help solving problems. Of course, it’s not just problem-solving either. 86% turn to YouTube to learn new things, making it a great option for hosting church study videos.
Considering YouTube has 30 million daily viewers, that’s a lot of people learning and getting help. Going back to videos being shared, YouTube users have shared over 5 billion videos, which is actually how many videos users watch every day.
Watching YouTube videos also elicit different types of feelings from users, such as:
- 46% feel more prepared
- 39% feel inspired
- 36% feel motivated
- 38% feel less stressed
- 28% feel connected
- 27% feel empowered
Your church videos have the power to inspire, motivate, teach and help people feel more connected. Creating a regular series keeps people tuning in, growing your audience, engagement and reach.
Boost Your Social Media Engagement
Trying to boost engagement on social media isn’t always easy. Sometimes, it may feel more like trial and error than anything scientific. However, videos are proven to increase overall social media engagement.
It’s important to increase engagement since Facebook actually prioritizes content that sparks conversations. On Facebook alone, videos increase engagement by up to 65%. In general, social media videos get 48% more engagement. Of course, those numbers will just continue to grow.
One of the most important forms of engagement is sharing since it helps your videos reach more people. Social media videos get shared 1200% more than text and images combined.
People watch millions of videos every day on social media:
- 75 million people visit Facebook’s video platform daily
- Over 10 billion Snapchat videos are watched daily
- Over 500 million people watch Facebook videos daily
- Over 1 billion hours of YouTube videos are watched daily
This shows that people crave video. Use these church video statistics to boost your engagement on social media and reach far more people.
Reach The Front Page Of Google
If you want your church website to perform better in search results, just add video. Yes, it’s true. Using videos actually boosts your search engine rank. However, make sure the videos are useful or you’ll increase your bounce rate, which has a negative effect on your search rank.
You’re actually 53 times more likely to reach the front page of Google if you use video on your church website. Of course, if you’re using videos on other platforms, you can also increase your website’s overall traffic that way too.
Now that you’ve improved your search rank, you want visitors to keep engaging with you. Maybe you want them to sign up for your church newsletter or a free gift. Adding a video to your landing page or sign-up page increases conversions by 34%.
In one case study that proves video has worked for years at increasing organic traffic through search results, one business increased site visits by 300% and visitors spent 100% longer on the site. In an 18 month period, the business saw a 157% increase in search engine traffic. Now, Google loves video even more, so you could see even better results.
Video Is Taking Over The Internet
It’s hard to use the Internet without running into video. Overall, video is taking over. It’s easy to consume. People remember things better. And, watching is just more fun than reading.
According to Cisco, nearly a million minutes of video will be streaming on the Internet every second in 2020. Video traffic will also account for 82% of all Internet traffic by 2022.
Every year, more people watch videos on their mobile devices. In fact, mobile video viewing rises by 100% every year.
Every week 78% of people watch videos online and 55% watch them daily. In the US alone, 85% of people watch videos regularly on both mobile and desktop devices.
The lesson from these church video statistics is you need video to ensure your church gets noticed online. Yes, your members may check you out, but if you want to keep growing, add video to your site, social media channels and YouTube.
Email’s Better With Video
If you’re sending emails to your church family, you want them to actually engage with the email. However, people receive so many emails every day, that they might ignore yours.
The good news is if you add video to your church emails, you could just boost your email engagement rates. Simply adding a video increases click rates by 300%. Once people realize there’s something great in the emails, they’ll open them more often as well.
Ensure you post something on social media or your church blog about including video content and links in your emails.
Video Marketing Is Now
All of these church video statistics show one major trend – video marketing isn’t just the future, it’s right now.
In addition to uploading videos of your sermons, consider live streaming to bring in more members and online followers. Start a weekly or monthly video series on your church website and/or YouTube. If you’re not sure what types of videos to create, take a look at other churches and ask your members what they’d like to see.
It doesn’t take long before you’re creating videos like a pro. Start small with short videos to see what people think. Videos make a great addition to any church engagement and marketing strategy.
As you implement a video strategy for your church, promote your videos on your church website. Contact us today for a free website analysis to help improve your site’s performance and increase video engagement even more.
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