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FAQ: Social Media Virtual Assistants

With the steps above completed, you’ll be ready to hit the ground running with your virtual assistant plugged into your various social media channels. But if there’s still more you want to know about how the process works, let’s answer some of the frequently asked questions:

What can my social media VA do?

Just about anything you’d be able to log in for and handle yourself. Obviously a virtual assistant can’t be a physical presence at your office, but they can log into your various social media channels, automate posts, handle research, identify trends, and much more. If you want to know which hashtags are best for your next post, ask a VA. If you want them to set up an automated system of scheduling posts, ask a VA. There’s really no limit to what you can accomplish with a VA when you leverage their experience.

Is it hard to train a virtual assistant to my specific accounts?

No, it shouldn’t be difficult. There may be a transition period during which time you’ll want to onboard your VA with as much specificity as possible. Let them know what you want. Let them know which tasks you’ll expect them to take on. Answer their questions. As time goes on, the VA can have more autonomy and you won’t have to check in so often.

Will my assistant be like a full-time employee?

In some ways, yes. In other ways, no. A virtual assistant can be a part-time employee, or you can choose to hire them for more hours. They won’t be physically present in your business, but they can become indispensable. For many VAs, however, they often find that they enjoy this structure more than a traditional job because it leaves them with more power and control in their own professional lives. And for you, the business, the increased productivity and sensible budget will help your business grow.

Who is a VA for?

There’s no one answer here, but there are plenty of people who would benefit from having a VA. Executives, freelancers, entrepreneurs, C-level management, social media managers, and more. Anyone who has a lot of social media tasks on their plate and wants to make sure that they get more done throughout the day will find the experience helps their productivity.

But we don’t want you to think that you have to feel limited by these definitions. The truth is, anyone who can benefit from having more time in their business days because they were able to outsource some of their work to a social media virtual assistant can easily see the benefit.

How good are VAs are handling social media?

It depends. If you’re hiring a general office assistant, you may have to train them. But if you hire someone with a lot of experience in dealing with various social media channels, you’re going to see that it can be quite different. Many high-quality VAs come from the world of social media, and may even maintain a strong presence themselves. In some cases, a VA may be able to make suggestions and consult with you on the right strategy. You don’t have to limit yourself to automating the most simple tasks of scheduling posts or researching in the background. A social media VA can be much more—provided you hire the right one.

• utsourcing your least favorite social media tasks. Are you always thrilled with working with platforms to schedule posts at the right time? Brainstorming new giveaways to give your online marketing a boost? A virtual assistant can take on some of your least favorite tasks so you’re free to focus on the bigger picture.
• Staying in touch with the Internet. It’s great to have a business that thrives on social media, but there’s one problem: it means constantly being in touch with said media. If you want to take a vacation, can you? Or are you always glued to your phone to monitor your ad campaigns or look at the latest hashtags? A virtual assistant can be the stopgap that helps you along the way.‍
• Handling work that goes outside of social media. What if you don’t have enough time to research the most important blog posts you’ll create? What if you want to devote more time to your SEO, but you still need your social media accounts to update? That’s where a VA can step in and help.

The Advantages of Hiring a Social Media Virtual Assistant

All of the above sounds good, but how does it actually look in practice? You’d be surprised at the kinds of advantages that kick into effect as soon as you make the hire. Let’s take a few of the most immediate:

Virtual Assistants are Qualified

For many, the idea of hiring a virtual assistant means turning over the work to someone less qualified. But with niche virtual assistants (like with social media virtual assistants), you’d be surprised at the high level of education, training, and experience. For example, according to BestOfBudgets.com, over 59% of all virtual assistants—niche or otherwise—have a college education. 

Likewise, according to a survey of successful VAs, the most in-demand VA skill in 2019 was social media management.

Not only are VAs highly qualified, but they’re increasingly flocking to areas like social media. That gives you a wide pool of VAs to select from.

Virtual Assistants are Relatively Inexpensive

Let’s say you were to hire a full-time social media manager at your company. You wouldn’t only have to pay the salary of this individual, but you would have to think about benefits, payroll issues, and much more. And given that an eight-hour-a-day commitment doesn’t always lead to the kind of productivity you might squeeze out of four hours of dedicated work from a virtual assistant—all of which are on the clock—then you begin to see how hiring someone full time can sometimes be an inefficient way to go about it.

Virtual assistants—even those with enough skills to demand a high pay per hour—still have an advantage over their full time counterparts. And because virtual assistants have the advantage of being more flexible—often working as a freelancer or on an hourly basis—it means that businesses are free to set their own budgets.

How to Hire Your Virtual Assistant for Social Media

If you’re eager to get going, there are four key steps to take right away:

• Sign up. Register with us today and you’ll be well on your way to hiring your first virtual assistant.
• Contact a customer success manager. We’ll be happy to work with you until you understand your own needs and are ready to make a selection.
• Choose a virtual assistant. It all comes down to this choice: where do your priorities lie, and which virtual assistant most has the skills and experience to match them?
• Onboard your new VA. Your VA may have experience and skills, but it always helps to introduce them to your company with a thorough guide to what they’ll be expected to take on. Do you have specific tasks you want them to know about? Which social media channels should they most pay attention to?

Let’s cut to the chase and answer a burning question:

Table of Contents

• What is a social media virtual assistant
• 20 tasks a social media virtual assistant can do for you
• Social media virtual assistant salary
• Where to find a social media virtual assistant

What is a social media virtual assistant

Even if you’re not fond of social media, and would rather not deal with it at all, its effect on a business is undeniable. For SMBs, social media can mean life or death when it comes to finding new leads and promoting their products or services. As for big businesses, maintaining a presence on social media broadens their avenue for customer services and marketing strategy.

Social media virtual assistants allow you to skip day-to-day maintenance of your online presence. Plus, if the first sentence in this section applies to you, they might even be more attuned with what gets results on social media. They allow you to maximize your two most important resources: your time and budget.

You’ll find below common, time-consuming tasks a social media virtual assistant can do for you. This list will hopefully give you a better idea of how they can improve your workflow and online presence.

20 tasks a social media virtual assistant can do for you

1) Establish and run your social media profiles

Business owners who are wholly focused on running their business might wonder which platforms suit their needs best. At the same time, those who already have accounts may wonder why they’re not gaining more followers.

A social media virtual assistant assesses which platforms can actually benefit your business. Whether that’s Instagram, Facebook, Tiktok, Twitter, or others, they’ll set up handles that will get clicks. Any pre-existing accounts will also get a do-over, and their day-to-day taken care of.

2) Develop a social media strategy

Part of the maintenance a social media virtual assistant will take care of involves social media strategy. In the same way, you can’t run a business without a plan, your online presence can’t advance without a strategy.

Social media strategies outline goals for your pages, and the steps your assistant will take to achieve them. Your social media virtual assistant can even come up with those goals and tactics.

They can also aid you in crafting your brand, which platforms to use, determine what value your social presence brings your customer base, how to gain and nurture leads, the metrics to determine your success, and what resources are needed to carry this whole strategy out.

On the other hand, you can have a general plan, and your assistant can fill in—and carry out—the details.

3) Research trending and reliable forms of content

Research takes a lot of time, and with other aspects of running a business occupying your mind, you might end up with muddied results. This is especially true for social media, where there are hundreds of trends going around at any given time.

Because of their specialized nature, a social media assistant knows exactly which trends to research. They’ll have a better idea of what will give you a short-term boost, and which tactics are reliable for long-term results. They can also explain why certain trends work for other businesses, and why they might or might not work for yours.

4) Create targeted content

Perhaps one of the best reasons to hire a social media virtual assistant is their ability to create content for your accounts. Assistants are jacks of all trades when it comes to content creation. Copywriting, graphic design and video editing are some of the top content creation skills they possess.

Any of the assets they create can be repurposed as well. Say they make a video for your Instagram Reels. They can cross-post it to Youtube Shorts, as well as Tiktok. You can also invest in pre-made social media assets that can be repurposed over and over again.

Your virtual assistant can also make cross-posting a focal point when they:

5) Schedule your content calendar

Scheduling a content calendar can easily be one of the most tedious parts of handling social media. Not only do you have to come up with content, but you also have to think about the best times to post them. But a social media virtual assistant takes these problems off your hands.

Your assistant can use publishing tools native to each platform to do their job. They can also use external tools, such as Buffer and Hootsuite, to handle all your accounts from one page. Since you own the accounts for these tools, you can also check-in and make changes.

6) Curate and share relevant content from other sites

Creating quality content may take time. Or if you’re just starting out, you need a way to gain social presence while still sharing relevant and quality content with your followers. In this case, your assistant can help out by finding and sharing unique, useful content from well-established blogs.

Aside from keeping your accounts busy, your activity can catch the attention of the content’s source, whether it’s from a business or an influencer. If they deem your content relevant to their own audience, they can share your posts to their hundreds, if not thousands, of followers. Doesn’t that seem like a winning proposition?

7) Update or delete existing content

Let’s be honest: We’ve all made ill-advised social media posts. Not everything we tweet or write on LinkedIn is a winner. So if you need someone to clean up your feed, or update time-sensitive content, your social media virtual assistant will do it for you.

Assistants can perform an audit on your handles. They can identify which posts no longer align with your brand identity and remove them. In the same vein, they can spot well-performing entries that can be revised and reposted.

8) Monitor platform analytics

Here’s a crucial task that every business owner understands: monitoring and analyzing performance metrics. What you may not understand is how social media metrics work, and which indicators are worth paying attention to.

That’s not a bad problem to have, especially when you have a social media virtual assistant to help. Your assistant can explain and present key metrics that indicate your online social growth. And by monitoring these metrics, they can adjust and optimize strategies for better performance.

Speaking of monitoring, your assistant will also:

9) Review campaign performance

Let’s say your overall social presence is improving. However, the results from a campaign on Facebook are poor compared to its performance on other platforms. This is where an individual campaign analysis comes in handy.

An assistant can assess if a campaign reached its target number of followers, conversion rate, page visits, sales, and other metrics you set for it. They can give you hard numbers, and snapshots of what worked and didn’t.

10) Analyze the competition

It’s always worth keeping an eye on what competitors are doing. You become aware of your competitive advantage over others, and what needs improvement. Predicting the competition’s next move also gets easier, as well as creating the best counter-strategy.

With your assistant, you can identify businesses that offer the same products or services and are on the same scale as you. They can then gather data on their campaigns, and report their gains and losses. In terms of social media, this data can help you and your assistant gain a bigger portion of your shared audience.

But have you identified your audience yet?

11) Identify your target audience

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer reach of social media. Social media is all-encompassing, and your posts can go beyond the scope of your business. Therefore, it’s important to establish the demographics of your audience.

Identifying your target audience with your social media virtual assistant can make the research process go by quicker. They can look at your platform metrics to check the average age and interests of the people who interact with your pages the most. Combined with your customer profile, you have a basis for who is most likely to follow your pages.

12) Drive engagement and interactions with the audience

Posting content isn’t enough—you need to build a rapport with your audience. Your assistant can do that for you! They can keep your page busy by posting content that encourages conversations within your community.

13) Monitor and reply to comments and inquiries

Part of your social media virtual assistant’s job is to monitor community interactions. They’ll engage with comments that have high engagement, or answer inquiries that other community members might also have. And if there are negative comments, they’ll either try to address them or remove them per community guidelines.

Engaging with the community also involves conducting surveys.

14) Conduct surveys

You want to know what your community needs, thinks about your business, or a product or service you want to roll out. But a regular open-ended question on your platforms won’t cut it. In this scenario, you can ask your social media virtual assistant to conduct a survey.

With survey tools such as Google Forms, SurveyMonkey, and Typeform, your assistant can quickly draw up the results and report back to you. You can feed this data back to your social media strategies, or parlay it into other aspects of your business.

15) Set up email campaigns

While not strictly based on social media platforms, your virtual assistant can still set up email campaigns for you. Weekly and monthly newsletters are great ways to keep your audience interested in your business, and can generate bigger conversion rates long-term.

You can have your virtual assistant offer signups through your social media platforms. This way, you can expand newsletter signups beyond your main site.

16) Offer giveaways

Giveaways are easy to organize, often cheap, and will grow your social media reach rapidly. Combined with audience care and persistent follow-ups from your assistant, this tactic can become a favorite in your early social media plans.

Every social media platform has its rules about giveaways. Have your virtual assistant review them in advance and report back so you won’t hit any snags when running your giveaways. On that note, another crucial task you can delegate to your virtual assistant is:

17) Generate and present reports

This is a task that’s peppered throughout this list. But it merits its own number because of how important it is. Compiling data into presentable and reader-friendly reports decreases the chances of miscommunication, makes them skimmable and easy to reference, and ensures your attention remains focused while going through it.

18) Manage and track paid social media services

Social media can be made easier with the help of paid tools. Buffer and Hootsuite, the external tools mentioned above, will allow your virtual assistant to manage multiple social platforms in one dashboard. That’s plenty of value, especially if you’re working with just one assistant.

Your assistant can keep track of your expenditure. After all, they’ll use it every day for your benefit. If you need an idea of what tools can help, browse through these posts:

• Tips for Working with a Remote Social Media Marketing Team
• How to Become a Social Media Manager: Skills, Salary, & Tools
• How to Start Your Own Social Media Marketing Agency

19) Discover influencers to collaborate with

Let’s go back to a point we made earlier.

Influencers, as mentioned, can give your pages a huge boost. They have a built-in audience that is also your target demographic. Connecting with these influencers, and creating a marketing campaign with them, can start with the help of your social media virtual assistant.

20) Help conceptualize and manage an affiliate program

Because of how it’s designed, social media is a great way of promoting your affiliate program. That’s because an affiliate program gives your audiences a chance to earn money while supporting your business. It’s a mutually beneficial program that your virtual assistant can run for you.

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