A social media virtual assistant (or remote social media manager) contributes to marketing strategy by harnessing the power of social media to locate and attract clients. Therefore, as an entrepreneur, you need to ensure that your business has a robust social media presence to create brand awareness, generate leads and answer customer questions. However, maintaining an active social media presence takes a lot of time. Social media virtual assistants will take away all the social media related tasks from your plate. Here is a deeper look into why you need a VA:

The Essential Roles and Responsibilities of Your Social Media Team

• Creating and updating social media pages for your business

A social media virtual assistant (VA) is someone who creates, schedules, manages, and monitors content posted to social media platforms. For example: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and/or Pinterest. Depending on the business size and industry/niche, a social media VA can be focused on one or more social media platforms for a client. The position’s main goal is to take over the responsibility of keeping up the brand on social media all while implementing the business owner’s social media marketing strategies.

• Creating content for social media accounts

The main way that you as a business owner can keep your social media active is by constantly sharing content that is relevant and useful to your audience. Content creation requires a lot of effort and creativity making it a very time consuming task. Given how content-driven social media is, it’s important to regularly put out valuable content to constantly engage the audience. Generating the right content after thorough research 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.

• Creating social media graphics

Eye-catching graphics can help you communicate better with your audience. When used correctly, great graphics can help increase post engagement. These graphics can be in the form of social media posts such as Instagram posts, banners and cover photos for different platforms and infographics. Creating great graphics requires your full attention and it will therefore take a lot of time if you’re doing it without any help. A social media virtual assistant will create all the social media graphics that you need for your business accounts.

• Scheduling 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. Social media virtual assistants have vast knowledge and skills in using different planning and scheduling tools like Planoly, Hootsuite, Buffer, Facebook Creator Studio among others

• Keeping track of social media trends

Being on social media means you have to be active throughout to catch new trends. However, as a business owner, you have other important tasks to attend to that can prevent you from being up to date with the latest trends. Knowing  what is happening is important as it helps you tailor your content in that direction, reaching more people and creating more brand awareness. A social media virtual assistant comes in handy here since they spend most of their time on social media and are therefore always up to date with the latest trends.

• Engaging with followers and monitoring interactions

Just one angry comment on a Facebook post can be dangerous for your PR. Hire a social media virtual assistant to monitor comments and replies and respond to them on time. This involves responding to comments, answering questions and addressing complaints. A social media virtual assistant ensures that they respond to customers and prospects. Fast and accurate responses results in happy customers and helps generate leads.

• Analyzing statistics and reports to see what converts best.

You can’t improve what you don’t measure. That is why it is important for you to analyze the performance of your social media posts. This will help you see what type of social media content had the highest engagement and then you can create similar content. A social media virtual assistant will analyze the performance of your social media platforms and share with you a report that can help your business improve its social media presence.

Your audience and potential customers don’t sleep and if they are not talking about you they are talking with your competitors. It is important to ensure you are engaging with them even though you have other tasks to take care of, driving forward your business. 

By hiring a social media virtual assistant you can ensure your social media is maintained and grows your business whilst you do what you do best.

And best of all you can save money as opposed to employing someone directly. You get to choose how many hours you want your assistant to work according to your budget.