The Ultimate Guide to Social Media Virtual Assistants
Are you fed up of spending your time on social channels in search of brand recognition and new sales?
Building a social media presence can seem like an impossible task and, if you don’t devote the time and effort, a wasted one. So why not use a social media virtual assistant to do the work for you? Here’s how it works:
Social media poses a quandary for many business owners. Well-curated and engaging social media channels have a huge impact on brand awareness, marketing, customer relations and indeed sales, and yet social media does not necessarily qualify as a core task.
Small business owners cannot spend long periods on creating and posting content and engaging with their audience without sacrificing core tasks.
Not only can a social media virtual assistant help avoid hiring and training costs they can also can increase your business efficiency by taking away the following time-consuming tasks related to managing your social media, therefore freeing up your time.
The 7 areas I will cover in this article are:
(Click on the links to jump to section)
1. Designing a social media strategy
A social media strategy is crucial to leveraging your profiles to increase brand awareness, educate, reach out to potential leads and properly communicate with existing customers. In order to develop and define a strategy, there are a whole load of time-consuming steps that need to be properly adhered to. Skilled social media VAs can help businesses define a target audience, carry out competitor research and plan a relevant social media calendar. All this comes from the experience gained from working with a wide variety of clients. Even if you have a strategy in place they can execute it for you and provide insight and bounce around ideas based on their practical knowledge.
2. Creating social media profiles
The reason this comes after the strategy is simply because not all social media is right for you. Sorry if this comes as a disappointment but depending on what your brand or business does - as well as where your target audience is present - will affect which are the right channels to be present on. For example, it may be that Twitter is not the right fit for you but it is crucial your brand is on Instagram. Making sure you are present in the right channels and networks is crucial to having a coherent presence. Limiting the social media channels in which you are present can also be important in concentrating on quality above quantity. It is better to have a small community of loyal fans than a much larger one of those who are not engaged with you. The latter is much less likely to become paying customers
3. Creating quality social media content
A social media VA can help you create fresh and original social media content, designed to resonate with your target audience and customers. This is crucial to make sure your brand or business is part of the bigger conversation. They can also help you strike the right balance between topical, informative and promotional posts to help your business reach a wide and relevant audience. With their expertise you can achieve a greater mix of content and have more time to perhaps test different approaches, truly assessing what is working, so future content is based on business intelligence. The same is true of something as simple as a hashtag. It takes time to research hashtags - which you should be using and how many for each post on each profile. You might not get to it but a social media VA comes with a lot of this knowledge and is likely do it faster and better.
4. Growing your social media presence
The internet is not the high street. It is all very well to have your e-commerce store but nobody will visit unless they see you. Through curated social media profiles you can generate a large amount of brand recognition in a way that simply existing on the internet won’t get you. A social media virtual assistant can run (and monitor) campaigns for you to make sure your content reaches your target audience and it is continuously optimised. They can add bandwidth to your capability to increase the number of platforms your business is present on as well as looking out for and potentially coordinating with influencers to increase your brand exposure.
5. Monitoring and engaging
So, here’s how social media is like life; you cannot pay people to like you. I mean I guess you could but it would not end happily. Because guess what, they don’t actually like you. You need to grow your following organically as much as possible. One of the lesser-known aspects of managing social media channels, at least by those who don’t use social media much, is the importance of engagement. We are talking pro-active engagement here, not just mindlessly giving a thumbs up to things as they scroll by. Therefore, you need to get involved; find people, comment on their profiles, respond to comments, join conversations and contribute as you would in “real life”. This is hugely time-consuming but a social media VA can take this off your hands. For example, just scheduling 30 minutes per day to do this kind of “engagement” work can build a relationship with your audience, which is very important for using social media effectively as a business. This also allows you to deal with negative comments which may come along, nipping any negative press in the bud.
6. benefits of working with social media virtual assistant
Maybe I should have put this section before but essentially many of the benefits of working with social media virtual assistant have been covered. Time is crucial to anyone running a small business so anything you can outsource means you free up your time to concentrate on what you do best - your core tasks if you like.
With a social media VA, you don’t need to be answering all those Tweets and comments or wasting your valuable time thinking of original content that your audience will love. All the repetitive and time-consuming tasks can be taken off your plate.
Furthermore, by using social media experts you can also rely on getting the best advice and the best quality content. Our social media VAs have experience working with a multitude of brands across all social networks and our team leader have 5+ years of digital marketing and business growth experience.
7. How to go about hiring a social media virtual assistant
You can hire a social media virtual assistant through a huge array of agencies and portals or freelancer sites like Upwork, for example.
If you go down either of the above routes you will need to keep in mind the fact that you have to outline their work for them, explain what you want doing and most likely define your own social media strategy. You can find more in depth information on hiring and interviewing a VA here if you need it.
An alternative to this is working with pre-defined content creation, management and marketing plans. Here at bizee.co we offer a series of plans and packages aimed at managing and implementing social media. Within these you can get strategy, original content, advertising and engagement to ensure a fully-rounded social media
8. Affordability
Hiring a full-time employee to work on your social media is not a realistic option for most small businesses. Consequently, many a business owner falls into the trap of managing their own social media, often in hope rather than expectation of results.
It is better to hire someone for the period of time that you need or the deliverables you agree. For example, we offer flexible social media packages to suit differing needs; 3 posts per week across 2 platforms, 3 platforms, 4 platforms, advertising, engagement add-ons – whatever you need.
In this way you are buying concrete deliverables rather than a person whose tie you have to worry about managing. Hiring a social media virtual assistant is therefore much more economical.
Author: Thomas Smallwood is an outsourcing specialist. Having worked in companies around Europe, from the support desk to the boardroom, he founded bizee.co to help small businesses grow through efficient delegation to skilled virtual assistants. He is an award-winning blogger and a passionate advocate for mental health awareness.
Connect with Tom on LinkedIn.