Before we dive in…

This content covers Dave’s experience working in social media at North Point Ministries, but it’s worth noting that you also has an incredible personal brand on Instagram.

Here’s a bit on that:

My youngest daughter has dyslexia and we started to realize that the way that she learns is visually.

As somebody who follows Jesus, I wanted to teach her about my faith and everything that I knew about the Bible and church and Jesus and stuff like that.

I thought the best way for me to do that was to post images that she could relate to and then I could connect some of my faith to those images.

All I wanted to do was to teach her.

So I started to post little photos and devotions for her and it's just started to grow.

More and more people wanted to learn from these same devotions.

I didn't plan that, it wasn't a strategy.

Now, I lean heavy into carousels.

I use all 10 slides because people are sticking around longer on my post as they swipe through each graphic.

Instagram is tracking people's movement across the screen to notice a post is working. The more times people swipe across, the more reach and engagement that I get.

What’s the backstory of how you got into social media?

Pre getting into full time ministry, and full time social media, I had no intention of ever doing anything like this. My goal in life growing up was I wanted to be a sports reporter.

I went to college to a sports degree so I did a journalism degree and a literature degree, and went into that as my career started writing for newspapers and magazines and ultimately ended up as a sports reporter for one of the three major networks in Australia, and thought that I'd be doing that for the rest of my life.

And then God called me into ministry.

I get into ministry, you know, in 2008, for the very first time, and I get asked to be a social media and online pastor.

So I started to leverage those skills from production, communication, on camera skills that I developed as a TV reporter for seven or eight years and just started to apply that to a ministry perspective and became an online pastor in 2008.

In 2013 I moved to Atlanta and became the online and social media pastor for North Point where Andy Stanley is the lead pastor.

I did that for seven and a half years, nearly eight years.

North Point at the time had six churches in Atlanta and so I would help from a central point of view overseeing social media strategy and social media philosophy in a lot of ways plus our central online campus as well.

If you add up all of the followers there was about a million people who followed those accounts when I was overseeing it.

What was your approach when you started?

Subscribe to Social Studies PRO to read the rest.