Social media is a lucrative avenue for companies to hit their revenue targets. Over 4.59 billion people worldwide used social media in 2022 and that number is predicted to reach almost six billion in 2027. Leading players allocate big budgets to social media marketing and hire top talent. But what kind of expertise does a social media virtual assistant possess?
A virtual assistant for social media is a remote worker who takes charge of your social accounts and undertakes activities to meet business goals. These could include brand awareness, generating leads, collecting customer feedback, or organic engagement to build relationships.
In this article, we discuss the tasks a social media virtual assistant performs to hit these goals and the skills they must possess to succeed in their role.
Why Do You Need a Social Media Virtual Assistant?
Check out this graph on the leading benefits of using social media for marketing purposes. Published by Statista, it identifies ‘increased exposure’ as the top reason why marketers use it, followed by ‘increased traffic’ and ‘generated leads.’
The study looks at businesses that have been using social media for more than five years and those for less than twelve months, and differentiates between ‘passive social media marketing’ and ‘active social media marketing.’
The former depends on user-generated content (UGC) and involves natural communication between customers, while the latter “requires deliberate employment of tactics/and or teams focused on creating and executing actual marketing campaigns.” A virtual social media manager can help with both and suggest new ways to reach your target audience online.
Besides that, a talented social media virtual assistant can provide incredible business value by:
1. Improving Customer Service
Unlike emails or phone calls, using social media for customer service is fast and direct. It allows you to have forward-facing conversations and tap into UGC to uncover customer feedback. A virtual assistant responds to questions and concerns and enables you to have positive customer interaction and serve people better.
2. Developing Positioning Power
Social media virtual assistants publish and manage content on your social media profiles which develop positioning power. This active engagement on social signals that you are active and open to new customers.
A social media virtual assistant also uses your social accounts to build online leverage on SERPs, which may well be the first touchpoint for buyers when they look up your brand on Google.
3. Building a Better Search Engine Presence
The industry is ripe with debate on the relationship between social media and SEO. Without a direct correlation between the two, it’s easy to dismiss the impact of traffic from social on SEO. But with linkless backlinks, the shares and click-throughs from social can send positive search signals to Google, helping your site rank.
A social media assistant posts content that drives engagement and significant referral traffic. See how our LinkedIn shows up on Google for the search query ‘Office Beacon’?
4. Humanizing Your Brand
Social media experts know that the hyper-professional “suit and tie” approach doesn’t work anymore. People want genuine and authentic content and engage with brands whose values align with theirs. A social media virtual assistant brainstorms methods to help you connect with people and build meaningful relationships on leading social channels.
What Skills Does a Social Media Assistant Need?
Social media assistants are responsible for understanding your audience and crafting a social media strategy that caters to their behavior in line with your business goals.
To be successful in their role, you must hire a virtual assistant for social media who possesses the following five core competencies:
- Communication: Engagement lies at the heart of social media, which requires genuine and transparent communication. Ensure your assistant can communicate with your audience, and not at your audience, since – as Amy Jo Martin put it, social media is a “dialogue, not a monologue.”
- Creativity: Social media engagement is all about providing value. Your content should feel native to the platform and feel relatable to your audience. The potential hire should possess a creative steak and be willing to experiment until they discover what sticks and why with followers.
- Copywriting: This skill forms the backbone of others. Without a captivating copy for your creatives, ads, or posts, it will be difficult to drive engagement. Check your assistant’s portfolio to understand their writing style or test their copywriting skills by sharing a short assignment.
- Design: Social media algorithms have veered away from simple text-based updates to visual content like photos and videos. Your accounts should offer variety and cater to all demographics of your target audience. Ensure your assistant has design chops and can create appealing assets that spark interest and drive business goals.
- Analytical Bent: Social media efforts are as good as the results. Unless you measure performance, it’d be hard to decide which channels to prioritize and where to direct resources. For eg, if your virtual assistant uses both organic and paid approaches on multiple social networks, they must know which tactic is working where and tailor their strategy for maximum results.
Next, let’s look at the tasks you can expect a virtual social media assistant to perform.
13 Tasks That a Social Media Virtual Assistant Can Perform
Social media offers a ton of opportunities to reach more customers and drive business growth. But depending on whether you are an established company or a rising SMB, the goals and results from social media marketing differ as per the scale and maturity of social media operations.
Recently, Joe Zappa shared the following post on the value of social media marketing on LinkedIn and how it generated over $200K in revenue for his business.
Impressive, isn’t it?
A social media expert sizes up your current efforts and performs the following tasks to hit business goals:
- Create and manage your social media profiles
- Build a social media strategy and monthly calendars, with KPIs
- Undertake customer research to understand user behavior
- Perform market research to identify content trends
- Curate, share, and moderate UGC
- Reply to DMs and user comments on posts
- Repurpose collaterals for social media profiles
- Run paid campaigns and track performance
- Run surveys and collect user feedback
- Discover opportunities for paid partnerships
The above tasks are only a brief glimpse into what a social media manager does. Depending on the role, experience, and expertise, you can hire a niche social media virtual assistant to establish your brand as an industry thought leader, promote website content, and strengthen your employer branding.
Ultimately, a clear idea of business goals is the key to finding the right fit for your social media marketing efforts.
How to Hire a Social Media Virtual Assistant?
An incorrect understanding of social media marketing often causes businesses to hire social media marketers without any concrete objectives. Unlike other channels, social media doesn’t generate (or guarantee) measurable results instantly.
Instead, it’s more about social listening, branding, community building, and forming long-term customer relationships to keep them engaged and interested in your offerings.
Even if you plan to use social media for paid campaigns, it requires a lot of upfront work on building and nurturing relationships to get meaningful results.
A solid understanding of how social media works and tracks performance is necessary for creating a JD that speaks to potential candidates and encourages them to apply for the opening.
Likewise, factors like company size, goals, and marketing maturity help them assess the right fit.
If you have the budget, you can advertise the role on your website and LinkedIn profile. But if you are an SMB that is just getting started and can’t hire in-house employees, try freelance platforms like Fiverr and Upwork.
Though economical, these platforms need you to spend considerable time on screening and training virtual assistants.
A better option is to outsource your social media marketing needs to a virtual assistant provider like Office Beacon, which takes care of the sourcing, onboarding, screening, and training.
Job boards, slack communities like Superpath, and Reddit are also a few other options.
Over to You
Big brands hold a monopoly over Google SERPs which makes it difficult for emerging names to compete with them. Social media is a cost-effective alternative and offers a comparatively level playing field.
If you take a story-telling approach and create a value-rich experience through quality content, your business stands an equal chance of winning buyers. What goals do you have for your social media? Let us know in the comments below.
