Hey, this is Casey Proctor with the Church Mag. You can follow me on Twitter at KCPROCTER, or you can follow all of us on at Church Mag, at CHURCHMAG. It's easier to type that out and spell that out. Anyway, so today I want to bring you a little quick guide to the perfect formatting for a Facebook post to your page. Whether that's your church page or if you have a blog or if you have a Facebook group, or even if you're just using it on a personal basis. So many times, you know, we have really great content that we want to put out and share and add value to people's lives, but just the simple matter of not paying attention to some basic formatting in Facebook can cause that post not to have visibility. And that's just a shame. So Facebook is a free service that we all get to use. You know, you can pay to play, but if you don't, there are ways to not game the system, but to play the game. You know, you don't play chess with checkers or vice versa. You know, you have to play by the rules if you want to win. And so to that end, I'm going to walk you through step by step how to craft a Facebook post using the perfect format specifically. We're going to be focusing on link posts because these are the ones that people get wrong. The most often. And so if you go to church, Mac right at this moment, as I'm recording this, you will see this post here at the top sensible social media checklist. And so if I click on it, it's going to pull it up so that the whole title shows up at the URL. And so I'm just going to grab. Oh, before I even go further, this image here on top is what's called a feature image. And the way you do this on a blog post specifically in the word past word press format is in the editor down in the bottom right, you will see a option that says featured image. So even if you've included an image in the body of the post, you need to set the featured image. And that's in the bottom right. You can even select the same image you use within the post, but you want to make sure you include that because that will make all the difference and how this works. So we're going to go ahead and grab the URL. I'm going to copy it. We're going to have a rich church max Facebook page. Check that out. So cool. Nice. Okay. So you'll see here that the post has already been shared on our Facebook page through a cool little app we've got as a plugin on church man called code scheduler. I'm going to show you how to post this directly to Facebook, which by the way is another trick to increase your engagement. So, you know, I use buffer and sort of church mag and we also use code scheduler and some of the things because there's so much stuff we want to share and we can't, you know, live post everything through church mag directly on Facebook. But that's just a little little trick for you there. So if I go ahead and paste in that URL, you'll notice that a preview. I'll go away a little plugin. All right. You'll notice that a preview loads in here where there's an image and then it pulls in the title of the post as well as the little caption underneath the meta description. So one of the things I'm going to do just because personally I want to get rid of it is this because it's redundant. So I am minimizing the headline because you're on church mags page. It says church mag here. You don't really need to know that it's an infographic in the title, especially if I don't want to use that description in the caption at the top. So now what you do and this is key. This is key. After the preview loads, delete the link. Let me repeat that. Delete the link. You don't need it. In fact, if you keep it in there, it's going to drive down your engagement, which means the less people will see it, less people will click, unless people will read your stuff by donate, support your cause, whatever you're trying to accomplish. Even if you're trying to make people laugh, you know, or think it won't happen. So again, delete the link. And then at this time, you can include some kind of caption. What sometimes people will do is if they share directly from the site, say, you know, I want to go ahead and share this right to Facebook from using the buffer app. Click that and it loads it in and it has this right here. So if I were to click on my Facebook page, for example, it's got the title and the caption and it includes the title here. And so if I just go ahead and schedule this out, everything's going to look really repetitive because it's got the headline here and in the post and it's got, you know, church, mag in the caption on the church, mag page and the links in two places. So it all looks really redundant. It kind of amateur to be honest. That's people aren't going to want to click that because it doesn't engage them. And so specifically when you're posting to Facebook, especially if you're using a plugin or even if you're sharing the link directly, delete the link and delete the title from the caption itself. All right, so I'm going to extend out and go back to Facebook. All right, so here we are. One of the thing you'll notice is that you have the chance to change the image. So this image right here that we're looking at is the featured image that was selected for that post when it was published on church, mag. So if we wanted to change this, so let's say you didn't include a featured image or you're sharing a post from someone else's site and you don't like the featured image that it pulled in. It was, you know, let's just say by accident, it was inappropriate or it just doesn't. It's just not a right fit. You don't like it. It's whatever it's your it's your post. You don't like it. You don't have to keep it. And so what that allows you to do is you just click this and you can pull in a different image and substitute it for whichever one is here. And so just by way of example, I'm going to click on that. This is a sermon series we're currently doing at my church. So I'm just going to grab that instead and we're going to wait a moment and it's going to think. The music. Ta-da. And so this image is just living here on the post. So if I publish this and someone clicks on the link, they're going to go out to church, mag. Nothing on church mag changes. Only my post does. So even if I wanted to post a picture of myself here, like pointing down and saying, click at this. That would work. And I could use that there so people are drawn to the link, even though the image of me or this image we're looking at right now, isn't affecting the post itself. So the other thing to include is some kind of caption. And you could say, surgeons, pilots. And productive. Peeps. Use checklists. To be. Excellent. If I can spell excellent. Excellent and efficient. Social media pros are no exception. And so it's a it's short and brief, even though you're allowed to use more words on Facebook than you are in Twitter, it's actually better to keep it short and sweet because people don't, you know, when you're on Facebook, you're scanning. If you're on your phone, you're thumbing through. If you're on your computer, you're scrolling up and down. And so, you know, we. The image and the. And a short caption and a good title are going to draw someone's attention. And so, and if the post is formatted properly like this one is, it will, you know, catch the attention of, you know, a Facebook and, you know, not. And it fits their parameters of what a good post is. So I could just go ahead and hit publish on this and and Facebook would like it and be good to go. Give you a few other things to note. This formatting stuff works to a point. You have to ensure that your content is good and that your content is shareable and that people that it resonates and is applicable to your audience. So it has to have high quality. If your content, you know, the actual content of the post itself, you know, here on Facebook and on the website does not have good quality. People are not going to interact with it and it will drive down your engagement over time on Facebook. If it's not easily shareable and so by having a short caption like this, surgeons pilots and productive peeps use checklists to be excellent and efficient social media pros or no exception. That's a little sound bite like that someone would just share, you know, just that quote, you know, that I typed in conceivably. And so it's going to have high quality. It's got to be shareable and it's got to be relevant to your audience. You know, we have a number of, you know, church professionals who read and follow church mag because of the social media, you know, acumen that we have on our writing team and that we share and write about because we want people in ministry and in nonprofits and in churches, you know, to be successful in social media to leverage it for kingdom purposes. And so that's, you know, one reason why I'm recording this little video for you. And so good content, shareable and relevant to your audience and then following this guide on how to post, you know, format a link post to your Facebook page. Let us know if you have any questions, you know, you can catch me again on Twitter at Casey Proctor or follow us on church for church mag at church mag. Thanks so much.