BRAINTREE -- Sean Hurley, director of marketing and communications for Boston Catholic Development Services, says that there's no "silver bullet" for getting parishioners' attention on social media.

"They all have different interests," he told The Pilot on Feb. 10. "They're not all the same."

Hurley's job is to get parishes to think more like marketing firms when it comes to social media. On Jan. 15, he, along with the Catholic Appeal and the Archdiocese of Boston Parish Services Office, hosted "Let's Get Social," a lunch and training course on social media use at the Pastoral Center in Braintree. The topics covered by the session included: "Creating Content and Catholic Social Media," "The Art of Tagging, Following, and Hash tagging," "Crafting Effective Posts," "Boosting Engagement," "Growing Your Following" and "Leveraging Analytics."

Hurley said that parishes "love to collaborate with other parishes, and to take those principles and tactics to their own parish."

Another "Let's Get Social" lunch meeting will take place on March 13 from 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. at St. Matthew the Evangelist Parish in Billerica. Parishes can register by visiting bostoncatholicappeal.org/social25.

St. Matthew itself is a parish social media success story, having launched its Facebook page in 2014. At the time, Communications Director Christine Kilburn said the page was "bland and simple."

"And then, over the past few years, we started to post more things, get more followers," she told The Pilot on Feb. 10.

St. Matthew has 782 followers on Facebook and almost 100 followers on Instagram. As of Feb. 10, recent posts on St. Matthew's Instagram account highlighted World Marriage Sunday, Jubilee pilgrimages, and National Pizza Day. On Facebook, Kilburn posts content from the archdiocese and notices of events happening in the parish. St. Matthew values interactivity online. Kilburn invites those who liked and commented on posts to like and follow the page itself. Pastor Father Christopher Casey posts frequently.

"That's not always the norm, to have another person or member of clergy post," Kilburn said.

One tool the parish uses is Catholic Social Media, which the archdiocese makes available free of charge to parishes. CSM is offered by Prenger Solutions Group, which describes itself as "a social media platform exclusively for Catholic parishes and dioceses." The Archdiocese of Boston has used Prenger for "about two years," Hurley estimates. Prenger organizes, disseminates, and helps parish social media managers schedule posts created by the archdiocese's ministries, including Clergy Trust, the Office of Vocations, the Secretariat of Evangelization and Discipleship, The Pilot, and the Catholic Appeal.

St. Matthew's parishioners really seem to like videos, such as a recent one explaining the Jubilee Year of 2025. The daily Saint of the Day posts are also popular.

"It takes a little time to see after you start posting, but you get a sense of what the parishioners or those that visit the page start to like, and then you can see and post those types of things," Kilburn said.

Hurley wants social media trainings to happen in the archdiocese at least four times a year, so he can learn the strengths and weaknesses of each parish.

"It's really early in the game to determine what makes a social media platform for a parish successful," he said.

The vast majority of parishes are already on social media, mostly Facebook and Instagram. Parish Facebook pages tend to have an older demographic, while parishes with large communities of young families, such as the Catholic Parishes of the Blue Hills, have thriving Instagram accounts. The Facebook page of Our Lady of Czestochowa Parish in South Boston, managed by a parishioner in her 80s, has over 1,000 followers.

"It's more of the exception than the rule, but I think a lot of people are intimidated by it and don't want to own it," Hurley said. "So this workshop is to educate, create awareness, and offer a solution for parishes that want to increase their social media following."

Some parishes also have a presence on X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, LinkedIn, and even Reddit. Hurley said that messaging on any program is a tool for evangelization, and has a direct impact on parish financial support of fundraisers like the Catholic Appeal.

"What's the metric?" He said. "How do you define success on Twitter? Is it bringing people in? Is it increasing your collections? Is it fostering engagement? I think every parish has a different goal for their social media campaigns."

The nature of the parish will influence not only the platform (St. James the Greater Parish in Boston's Chinatown heavily relies on WhatsApp to communicate with parishioners) but also how that platform is used. For example, Hurley pointed to one parish with a Portuguese-speaking community that posts on a local Portuguese-language Facebook page, but does not have its own page.

"The archdiocese and all the different ministries are increasing the number of multilingual posts that the ethnic communities can share as well," he said. "So that's an ongoing effort to increase the amount of that type of content."

"I think the goal is that we want to get all of the parish together," Kilburn said. "So if there's a Portuguese Facebook page and another Facebook page, they can all come together, and everything can be posted on one page."

In other cases, a well-meaning parishioner will create an unofficial Facebook page for a parish, unbeknownst to the parish itself. Part of the "Let's Get Social" trainings is teaching parishes how to find volunteers to handle social media.

"They're short-staffed," Hurley said. "A lot of them are and it's hard for them to identify people to actually do that as a job, because most people do it on the fly. There isn't a dedicated resource for it."

He said that the "right person" to run a parish's social media is devout, dedicated to their parish, organized, good at time management, creative, tech savvy, mature, and responsible. The "wrong person" is someone who doesn't think before posting something that "may not be appropriate."

"That's the great thing about Catholic Social Media," Hurley said. "The content is there. It's been vetted. It's not controversial."

The primary focus of the archdiocese's posts are personal stories of people who have been impacted by the archdiocese's ministries. When The Pilot spoke to Hurley and Kilburn, World Marriage Week was underway, and parishes were posting the stories of married couples.

"Some are men and women who have been married 40 years," Kilburn said. "Some are just newly married. And it goes to different people in our congregation who each can look at it in a different way."

Clergy Trust Wellness Coordinator Kate Marshall recommends recipes, which are posted on social media, offering viewers something useful in their own lives while also highlighting the work she and her team do for the archdiocese. Marshall's recipe for cranberry citrus sauce, posted on the eve of Thanksgiving, was a hit on parish social media. Some parishes use memes and humor to get their message across.

"I think humor is really good," Kilburn said. "And I think even Catholic Social Media has some humor."

Kilburn also serves as St. Matthew's finance director. She said that analyzing numbers and statistics in that job has helped her to do the same with the parish's social media.

"I grew up in the parishes of Billerica, and I'm still a parishioner there," she said. "So it means a lot. And I'm very dedicated to it."