Social Media has emerged to form an indispensable part of businesses. It is a crucial platform to develop valuable business insights and grow your brand. People spend as little as 5 hours to as long as 20 hours per week on social media.
With almost half the week spent on social media, entrepreneurs are hardly left with space and time to focus on other things.
For entrepreneurs, handling social media for businesses is tedious and time-consuming. It also wastes your potential to focus on other things. It works out best when you hire a seasoned virtual assistant who is skilled in handling social media.
Social media needs a solid strategy to work in your favor. You can’t exploit its potential by writing one post a day or running ads to get more likes on your business page. Instead, it would help if you had a hard-core strategy to achieve different milestones. And, hiring a social media virtual assistant can help you take care of your brand’s online presence. A virtual assistant works remotely, ensuring they are more affordable and bring unique benefits to you. No vacations, sick leaves, travel reimbursements, and taxes have to be afforded by you.
How to become a Social Media Virtual Assistant?
As a social media virtual assistant, one must be well-versed with different digital channels. This is what a virtual social medial assistant is expected to do.
- Updating social media profiles: A social media assistant is responsible for keeping your business pages and profiles up to date. All your social media accounts and pages must reflect the same information about your business brand. Any relevant update is communicated by the virtual assistant to all your target customers.
- Content Research and framing: Social media is highly content-driven; thus, it is essential to update your social media profiles. It helps to attract your target audience. It is the task of the virtual assistant to strategize creating content, schedule it and let it out on various platforms.
- Strategize your content delivery: Your social media assistant would create weekly and monthly planners for social media channels. What topics should go out on your business page? What is the response of the target audience on the current content posts? What should be the next series of topics for creating content? All this needs to be worked out regularly in advance. And, posting content that is liked by your audience will help you engage them in the long run. Your virtual assistant will gather content and manage the posts.
- Run social media Campaigns: All your digital marketing campaigns will be planned and executed by a virtual social media assistant. For instance, posting polls, funny quotes, status updates, running contests, etc.
- Interacting with customers: One negative comment on social media can cost you a lot. You need to hire a virtual assistant to comment, reply and respond on time.
- Tracking metrics: Tracking social media progress is essential for accounting for the number of likes, visitors, posts, followers each month. Your social media assistant will help you get a clear insight into what is being liked by your audience.
Before understanding how to become a social media virtual assistant, it is essential to understand its job description.
The Job Description of a Social Media Virtual Assistant
- A social media assistant is expected to come up with innovative ideas for online posts.
- Optimize content for social media optimization.
- Create new impressive content.
- Release social media posts regularly.
- Comment and interact with the target audience.
- Analyze and evaluate the current trends online. Use study metrics to deduce valid inferences.
- Keep the social media accounts updated with the ongoings of the business.
- Constantly innovate new content.
- Keep track of the competition online.
- Send out newsletters.
- Promote ad campaigns on social media.
Professional Qualification
- A social media virtual assistant must be a graduate or above.
- Must possess relevant hands-on skills in handling digital channels.
Here are the steps to become a Social Media Virtual Assistant:
- Writing Skills: The first step is to be able to deliver as per the job requirements. The best way to kick start your career is to fetch relevant experience in content writing, digital marketing, and social media marketing. A certificate and relevant experience will surely help to bring you initial few projects or jobs. Moreover, creating engaging social media posts, videos and blogs will help to showcase your talent.
- Basic knowledge of designing: Having hands-on skills in Canva, Crello, etc., is essential. It is essential to develop attractive infographics or graphic designs in every post to attract your target audience.
- Social Media Management Tools: The social media virtual assistant must be well-versed with tools like Crowdfire, Buffer, etc.
- Strong communication and networking skills: There is a constant buzz to be made online. Tons of comments and likes may flow in if any of the posts get viral. The social media assistant has to constantly touch with the audience to let them stay hook to your web page.
- Showcase your strengths: Lastly, it would help if you showcased your strength to the job hirers. You must be able to recognize and identify the trends. A virtual assistant is expected to be a good communicator who is willing to work hard. The better your presentation is, the more visitors you get to your profile.
What Can a Social Media Virtual Assistant do?
Hire a social media virtual assistant to perform the following tasks.
- Keeping social profiles up-to-date: When you hire a social media virtual assistant, they’ll keep your online presence updated. Your pages and accounts will reflect the same information and maintain a consistent brand image. If there’s an update related to your business that your audience must know of, your VA will take care of communicating this to your customers on every social media platform.
- Content research and drafting: Given how content-driven social media is, it’s essential to put out valuable content to engage the audience regularly. After thorough research, generating the right content is a task a social media virtual assistant is adept at handling. Your VA will create content, schedule it, and post it on different channels.
- Scheduling and managing posts: Hire a social media virtual assistant to create weekly and monthly planners for social media posts and status updates. Regularly posting content will go a long way in keeping your audience interested. Your VA will prepare calendars, prepare/gather content, and manage all posts.
- Running Campaigns: For instance, they can post polls, post status updates and images, post funny quotes and create social media contests. Such campaigns can generate a lot of hype for your brand and keep your customers engaged over the long term.
- Audience Engagement: One angry comment on social media can disrupt your brands’ image. A virtual assistant constantly interacts with the audience and monitor comments to respond on time.
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How much do you pay a Virtual Assistant?
The price of social media assistants varies with the skillset and region.
Here are the price statistics of hiring a social media virtual assistant depending on regions across the world.
| USA | $ 10-20/hour |
India | $ 5-15/hour |
Australia | $ 5-25/hour |
UK | $ 10-30/hour |
Philippines | $ 5-25/hour |
Similarly, according to Indeed, Virtual Assistant salaries in the USA range from $7.25 to $38.40, averaging $16.15 per hour.
Who needs a Social Media Virtual Assistant?
Anyone who has the following tasks in hand requires a social media, virtual assistant.
- Part-time work requirement: If you have work that requires only a few hours every week, then hiring a full-time employee may not work out financially.
- Repetitive and non-core tasks: If the business has too many repetitive tasks, it is best to hire a virtual assistant. Handling social media is a repetitive task that is time-consuming and works out best if you have a dedicated virtual assistant to take care of it.
- Lack of expertise and relevant skills: If you lack the know-how of handling social media handles, it is best to hire a virtual assistant. These people are seasoned to give you what is required in a quick turnaround time.
- Planning to go online: Post COVID-times, every business is choosing to go online. It is essential to hire a virtual social media assistant who constantly provides relevant content online to grab online attention. Any business which has the above tasks to be done will need a virtual social media assistant.
Are Virtual Assistants in demand?
Every small and big business needs virtual assistants. Time is the most valuable asset for every entrepreneur. Be it an online business model or a brick-and-mortar set-up; every business needs virtual assistants to ease its operations.
Virtual assistants also bring down the cost of running a business to a great extent, as no expenses are met.
Virtual assistants come with multiple benefits like:
- They free up your time to focus on core business areas.
- They are highly cost-effective.
- They are highly skilled and technically trained who bring relevant skills and experience to the table. They are qualified to work on social media tools and CRM tools to grow your business.
- All mundane, time-consuming tasks are outsourced to virtual assistants, which helps to improve your work efficiency.
With so many benefits around, virtual assistants are much in demand.
