INTRODUCTION

The moment social media sites have taken business world by storm and dispersed the misconception that social networking is merely about reading, sharing, liking, tweeting, reposting, trying on new identities, pinning pretty pictures they have engaged broad audience of business professionals seeking new opportunities and social media virtual assistant services fulfilling these cravings.

CASE PRESENTATION

Imagine just by building your company presence on social media networks yourself or using virtual marketing assistant’s helping hand you get more traffic to your website, cultivate business relationships with potential clients, find partners and like-minded individuals, generate new leads and odds are you’ll ramp up your sales. Who would neglect such an opportunity?!

Definitely not those who bend over backwards to promote their brand, who spend their working days designing, implementing business strategy, holding negotiations, internal meetings, engaging with customers, overseeing core company processes and go to bed in the early hours over countless demands of their businesses and urgent issues. Furthermore, 63% of these proprietors and CEOs already spend around 5 hours a week on social media, while the rest, according to recent online survey, spend more than 20 hours. How do they manage? What is the strategy? It’s nothing short of a miracle, is it?

There are limits to how much work can be completed by one individual in one day and 20 hours a week equals to half of the normal week leaving no room for anything else.

MANAGEMENT

Well, it’s barely a miracle. Does common sense, cool head and decisiveness imply a miracle? Hardly.

Here is where a social media virtual assistant enters the picture. While lightening the burden and keeping in mind strategic objectives of the client a virtual social media assistant gets down to work and makes social platforms serve customer’s best business interests. First, the approach media marketing virtual assistant adopts to profiles management is, as a rule, holistic and involves:

1. Prepping social media updates

Thinking up engaging content is a challenge in itself, let alone maintaining a string of updates on a few social media sites. For a virtual assistant social media networks strategy is a as familiar as the back of the hand. Knowing ths field inside out, social media virtual assistant will:

• do careful research and decide which social networks will add value to your business promotion and should be posted on,
• decide on a content strategy,
• create versatile quality content of engaging catchphrases, images and captions related to your line of business, tips on business efficiency, infographic, motivation quotes, industry updates engagement questions, etc.

2. Setting up a posting schedule

Once the content strategy is clearly defined, your social media virtual assistant will group updates into categories and assign days of the week or daytime for these categories. For example, links to blog posts on Sundays, catchphrases on Tuesdays afternoon, industry updates on Fridays etc. It definitely takes time to get updates ready, organized, scheduled and it takes still more to keep up with this schedule. Well, you can easily schedule your posts in advance with Hootsuite or Circular but will you fit them in with the other business schedule you have to take care of daily?

3. Preparing your new products or services highlights

Updating your business information doesn’t mean having your virtual assistant add a few words about new products and services but create value prosition which is something from a different league. Virtual marketing assistants with a wealth of experience providing social media virtual assistant services sometimes spend days looking for the best possible way to communicate the benefits of products, services, ideas. Dream of swelling the ranks of these professionals?

4. Updating customer profiles

If you have social media marketing virtual assistant on top of such things as keeping your profiles up-to-date you do not have to worry about all possible modifications social networks seem increasingly responive to. Once new Page design has been adopted, About Section obligatory fields added, Profile design modified it won’t pass you by if you’ve contracted social media virtual assistant

5. Engaging and interacting with visitors/followers

Simply sending promotional posts won’t get you far. That is the reason why virtual social media assistant is plugging away at inspiring social interaction. Enhancing your profiles with encouraging, high-frequency content is just part of the game your virtual assistant plays. To reap the benefits of networking you need to be highly responsive and active yourself. That means having your virtual assistant respond to comments, befriend and follow like-minded people, visit followers pages, share and comment on content that is not yours, interact with those who retweeted your post, thank your followers, invite people to like your page. This task could be 24/7 job which is why network building is always included into virtual assistant social media packages.

6. Monitoring and tracking results

Creating streams for @mentions, feeds for keywords, monitoring statistics, keeping tabs on your competitiors progress and making necessary adjustments is another vital task for a virtual assistant handling social media profiles.

CONCLUSION

You may choose to go virtual or stop spending time managing your social media accounts. You may take a shot at one of virtual assistant social media packages start building your network and online presence as part of business strategy or you may not. It is all up to you. Just consider this: you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. How about having virtual social media assistant take them for you?