7 Advantages of Hiring a VA to Do Your Social Media

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Can I hire a virtual assistant to handle my social media pages?

A virtual assistant is someone who works remotely for your company and can do everything from writing emails to scheduling appointments.

A social media virtual assistant, on the other hand, is an online worker who manages your social media for you.

They are an independent contractor who can do all of your social media tasks for you. As an employer, you can get help with all aspects of your social media presence: from writing posts and scheduling them to posting on your behalf and engaging with followers.

In this episode, we will talk about the seven advantages of hiring a virtual assistant to do your social media.

Listen to the Episode

Read the Full Transcript

Atiba de Souza: Hey, welcome to the Build Your Team show! And today we're going to be talking about the seven advantages of hiring a VA to do your social media. 

Now, full disclosure. This is a topic that I know a ton about because I hire VAs to do social media, okay? So I know on this show, very often we talk about team building and strategies and, and we hear from other people who share stuff with us and, and that's awesome and wonderful. But today I'm going to be telling you about something that, yeah, I've got an entire team of virtual assistants that manage social media for me and for my clients as well. And so we're going to talk about what, what can they do? How can they help? All right? That's what we're going to dive into. 

And, and by the way, if you're here and you like this video, if this makes any kind of sense to you. If this is making common logical sense, is one of my mentors used to say to me all the time, go ahead and hit the "like" button down below and, and also feel free to subscribe too so you can get more of this awesome content as it comes up. 

Okay! Let's dive in. And by the way, I'm Atiba. Welcome to the show! And we're going to be talking about this here. What are the seven advantages of hiring a virtual assistant to do your social media? Now, let me offer you a word of caution before we start. Any time you're hiring anyone, virtual assistant or staff, to do outbound-- or even a consultant for that matter, outbound, client-facing communication for you, you have to make sure that they truly understand who you are, who your brand is and what it is you're attempting to put out into the world. Don't hire someone blindly and say, "Hey, I'm-- this is my company. Go create some social media for me". That doesn't work. That doesn't work because they don't know you, okay? They don't. And it's not their job to know you. It's your job to teach them who you are so that they can best portray you online. 

Okay. That's my word of warning. Let's dive into the seven. Y'all ready for this? Seven. 

So number one, they can help you develop a social media strategy. Keyword: help. They can help you develop a social media strategy. 

Now, a really great social media VA who's been doing it for a lot of years, they may come in and they may have a strategy that they've been using all along. That's cool! That's wonderful! Take their strategy. Look at it and see if it makes sense to you. See if you like it. They may be doing things that you don't like, that you may not even find to be ethical. But I'll give you a big one on, on Instagram is the whole follow-for-follow, there are a lot of people who do that and say, "Oh, I'm going to just going to follow-for-follow. And that's how I'm going to build your follower base". Well, okay. But is that really what you want? Do you just want a bunch of drones who liked to hit follow back? Or do you want people who are engaging? Don't know. Don't know. It depends on why you're using social media. 

If you're using social media just for vanity, then sure. Have lots of likes. Have lots of follows. Cool! But if you're using it for true engagement and to build your community or to, to, to prospect and find new customers, then maybe follow-for-follow is not best. But that's why the VA can help you develop your social media strategy, okay? They can help you. 

You're still in control. They still have to do, that what you want that's going to be right for your company and your brand. Okay. So that's number one. 

Number two is they can research content. Yeah. There's a ton of research that you can do on social media. Number one, your competition. You can see what they're doing, what they're putting out, okay?

And number two in their-- in terms of research is, your, your VA, once you have a strategy and you know the type of content you want, they can start to research who else is doing content similar, that may not even be your competition, in different markets. So tons of research of content that they can do and provide for you, okay?

Which leads us into number three, because after you've researched content and see what else is out there, see what other people are doing, then you have to start thinking about, "Okay, well how do I curate some of this content? How do I start pulling some of this together and figure out what we're actually going to, to, to do? What we're actually going to look like?" Okay?

And so a VA can also help you there. Now, I want to be very clear. Not every VA that you meet, who does social media, is really great with the visual and really great with the graphics. And so if your VA isn't, that's okay. You may need to find one who is, if that's what you need. Or you may need to find two: one who does graphics and one who's great at doing some of the research and, and, and some of the engagement stuff. It's okay. 

Not every VA is going to be able to do every single thing. And that's something that you have to be really, really careful with, is understanding their limitations, is understanding that I hired you to do this, and it had all of these tasks, but you may not be good at all these different areas of social media, okay? 

It's your job to know that and to, to realize where they struggle. Because they're going to tell you they can do it all, but it doesn't mean that they can. And it's your brand at the end of the day. It's your brand at the end of day, okay? 

Now, the other thing they can do is they can go in and update your content. So once you've come up with a strategy, you may look at some of your old content and realize "This doesn't fit my strategy!". I had that happen last week with a client. We did an audit for them. They called us and asked us to do an audit and we did, and we said, "Okay, who's your audience? What are you trying to do?". And we realized over 75% of their previous post did not fit who they wanted to be and what their strategy was. So guess what? You can go in and start cleaning out a lot of that. That's one of the things that a VA can do for you.  

Next thing is they can schedule and manage your posts. Now, this is what most people think of when they think of social media management, is "Okay, we can get some posts. We're going to post one time a day, three times a week", whatever your frequency is. "I'm going to be posting and I need you to come in and manage the post, schedule them, and make sure they go out and, and have the captions and the hashtags", and all that type of stuff. Yeah, most VAs who are social media managers definitely can do this. We personally, in-house, use a software tool that all of our VAs use, which is called Hootsuite. I put a link for that down below for you. But Hootsuite will help you with the management of your different social media platforms and allowing someone else to be able to manage them without you having to give them all of your passwords for all of those accounts. So Hootsuite is great for that, okay? So check out that link down below. 

Now the thing there as well is you're having them schedule and manage the post. Okay. Depending on your brand. Like for me, for example, I also, on top of doing all of this, I also have a cooking brand where it's called Cooking with Atiba.

I cook. I teach people how to cook, okay? And I make these meals that, that anyone really can make them and teach you how to do it. However, if I hire a VA to take my content that I created, my images and my video, and I say, "Hey, go post this on social media for me. Go schedule it and manage my posts for me". Well, she has to, or he would have to take the post, edit the post, schedule the post, write the captions.

Now they may not know what I made. They may not know what to write. And then they have to find the hashtags that are relevant. They may not know. And so it's very important that you also understand that. If you're in a niche that is super specialized, you may hire a VA and they may not be really great at doing the scheduling and managing of your posts because they don't know all the nitty-gritty ins and outs of your industry. And you may have to step in and help them or find someone who does, okay? 

So like in my case, find someone who has the food background and the social media management background, put them together. Now they can help me. All right? So that's something that you, you've got to look at as well. Alright. So that is number five. 

Number six, they can monitor conversations. Now, this is one of the beauties of social media, is you get to have conversations with real people. You can be really real with people on social media. You can talk back and forth with people on social media. 

And I'm not just talking about in DMs. I'm not even talking about in notifications. We do it all the time on Instagram. We have long conversations on people's posts, back and forth on people's posts. And a VA can help you manage those conversations. And he goes, "Oh, but how are they going to talk like me?" Yeah, they can't. But what they can do is there are some simple things that they can say and, and comment on back and forth. And then when they have a question, you teach them to reach out and ask you. You teach them to reach out and ask you. 

And what we do is we actually keep a library for each of our clients of all of the questions that people ask and all the things that we want to say to people. And so when a VA gets a question or a comment on social media, and they need to know how to respond, they first go to the library and see, has anyone ever answered, asked this question before? And what was our response? Boom! There's a response! We can use that. And if they can't, then they come and ask a question. And that's what you've got to teach them. Just come and ask the question. So that's number six, they can monitor conversations. 

And then number seven. Number seven. And I want you to, to, to hear, want you to hear the first six that I talked about was all about setting you up and building relationships on social media, okay? So many people look at social media and say, "Oh, I'm going to get on social media. I'm just going to sell, sell, sell. And I'm gonna sell!" And you miss the point of the social side. In order to sell on social media, you first must be social. You first must build relationships. 

So number one through six, we're all about helping you figure out how to build relationships. Number seven. Number seven. Yes. They can help you with lead generation. Now I want to caution you here. You cannot jump to number seven. Like I just said, you have to do the first six. And lead generation may not be right for you on social media. That's all going back to part of your strategy. All going back to part of your strategy. 

For your business, social media may just be an awareness play. It may just be a place for you to exist so that people can become aware that you exist. And then drive them to your website where they become leads, okay? Depending on your industry. 

Likewise, social media may be a place where you absolutely can develop quick conversations and develop leads, and so. I see a lot of people in the personal trainer space do that. Heck I do that in the cooking space. I develop leads and sell on social media.

However, if I was a realtor, I probably could not sell a house over social media yet. I'm sure Zuckerberg and Metaverse will figure that out sooner or later, but I probably couldn't get a lead and sell an entire house off of social media. 

Okay. So maybe I'm on social media. If I'm a realtor, for awareness. So people know I exist and so I can drive them to my website so that they can become leads from my website, okay? So number seven is social media can help you to develop leads. And you can use your virtual assistant to do that. 

Your virtual assistant can learn what your ideal customer looks like and the types of conversations you want to have with your ideal customer. And when those customers start to appear, they can then alert you, "Hey, here's somebody you need to talk to". So that you don't have to talk to everybody. You can only talk to, or your sales team depending on the size of your company, so you could only talk to the people who are maybe your ideal customer and actually want to buy from you. 

So guys, that's it! I know that was a lot. That's the seven, okay? So number one, they can help you develop a strategy. Remember it's help. They can help you research content. They can do content curation. They can update your existing content. They can schedule and manage your posts. They can monitor conversations that are going on on social media. And number seven, they can help you to generate leads. They can help you to generate leads. 

Now can one person do all of those? Yes, somebody who's really, really, really good. In my experience though, it's not always the same person. The person who's really great at creating the graphics, and creating the videos, and creating the posts, and posting, and managing all of that, is usually not the same person who's really great at having the conversations. Usually not the same person. Can be, but not always. So if you get in a situation where you hire a social media manager and they come in and, and they start to do things, you've got to figure out where in the seven they really excel, and let them do that and have somebody else help them backfill the rest.

All right, everybody! I hope this was helpful. If it was, hit that "like" button. Hit that "subscribe" button. I will see you real soon, bye!

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