Key Takeaways:
Global users spend an average of 141 minutes a day on social media platforms.
With approximately 40% of consumers purchasing items from social media platforms, social commerce is very popular in the U.S.
The average base salary of social media managers is very high. Social media virtual assistants offer their services for way less than that.
The world spends 15 billion hours consuming social media content daily—equivalent to more than 1.75 million years of human existence!
With social media becoming an integral part of our daily lives, brands need a strong and consistent online presence to stay visible and relevant.
But handling time-consuming and distracting tasks can take up a big chunk of your day—unless you find the right help.
This is where social media professionals can make a difference.
While in-house social media managers focus on strategy, content, audience engagement and brand growth, they often don’t bring the cost-effectiveness and skill sets of virtual assistants.
Overseas VAs especially give you access to the global talent pool and are comparatively budget-friendly, allowing you to reinvest the saved money into business growth or even hiring scalable talent.
Not only this, virtual assistants can offer support for a wide range of tasks, unlike social media managers. This means you can build an entire team of VAs for different business functions.
Understanding the difference between social media managers and virtual assistants will help you choose the right support for your business needs.
Explore their roles, analyze their key differences and find out who’s the right fit for your business.
Why Your Business Needs Social Media Management
Global users spend an average of 141 minutes a day on social media platforms.
Imagine the daily opportunity to engage with users, target potential customers, build brand awareness and drive conversions through meaningful social media interactions!
As Erik Qualman, author of Socialnomics, says,
We don’t have a choice on whether we do social media, the question is how well we do it?
But social media is not an easy place to navigate. In the vast sea of online marketplaces, your business can easily disappear.
The competition is incredibly fierce and unless you consistently work on your social media presence, you’ll lose out to your competitors.
This is why you need a professional to manage your social media channels, curate a unique brand identity and attract your target audience.
What Do Social Media Managers Add to Your Business?
Social media managers (SMMs) are a vital part of every business’s marketing team. These digital marketing professionals help your customers find your business through all the right channels.
SMMs handle all your social media marketing tasks using best practices and strategies. This includes managing social media campaigns, tracking advertising key performance indicators (KPIs), engaging with the community and more.
Unlike VAs, SMMs are permanent in-house employees. Their role centers on boosting your brand’s visibility, ideating unique and personalized marketing strategies that work for your business and managing the technical and SEO-related aspects of digital marketing.
What Do Virtual Assistants Add to Your Business?
Virtual assistants (VAs) are talented remote workers who act as a support system for your business and your teams.
Aside from core business processes, every business has to deal with piles of background tasks. These include various administrative tasks such as managing emails, keeping data records, conducting market research and more.
All these tasks are essential for the smooth working of your business, but they are not what your business is about.
And this is why you need virtual assistants. VAs can take care of all these repetitive tasks and daily duties.
Aside from general tasks, you can also find specialized VAs who can help you in niche areas like graphic design, research or even social media marketing.
Hiring virtual assistants has more benefits than just creating background support. With VAs, you save your time, resources and money.
As you delegate all your routine tasks to VAs, you free up your time to focus on more important tasks. Since VAs are not like your regular employees, you can save on various overhead costs like office space, insurance and employee benefits.
They are also a flexible hiring option for every business. Whether you are looking for permanent support or additional hands, you can hire a full-time or part-time VA and scale your business per your needs.
Read More: Top Benefits of Hiring an Offshore Virtual Assistant
Who Are Social Media Virtual Assistants?
Both social media managers and virtual assistants play an important role in a business. But what if you don’t need a full-time in-house employee to help you handle your daily tasks?
Isn’t there someone who can help you manage your social media marketing without the high costs of an in-house hire?
That’s exactly what virtual assistants for social media management do!
SMM virtual assistants can perform all the regular social media management tasks like creating engaging content, posting regularly, engaging with your audience, increasing brand visibility and more.
This means they can perform all the basic tasks of a social media manager and come with the additional benefits of VAs!
Tasks You Can Assign to a Social Media Manager
Marketers around the world use social media platforms such as Facebook (86%), Instagram (82%), LinkedIn (72%) and YouTube (58%) to promote their brands.
You need someone to constantly stay on top of digital trends, manage multiple social media accounts, build a credible brand image, engage with brand followers and convert social media audiences into loyal customers.
This is the job of your social media manager.
Here is a list of tasks that fall exclusively in the job description of an expert social media manager.
Target Audience Analysis
Social media managers can help you identify and specify your target audience. This is an important step for any digital marketing strategy.
It involves researching audience demographics, finding consumer motivations and understanding customer behavior.
SMMs can quickly find key demographics, identify audiences that share the same values as your brand and keep detailed data of consumer patterns.
Trend Analysis
When your business depends on maximizing its visibility, you can’t stay behind trends.
SMMs can analyze new trends in digital advertising and marketing campaigns. They can analyze audience responses to new trends and find out if new techniques can work for your brand.
They can also explore how these new trends can be transformed to highlight your brand image online.
Strategy Development
By combining insights from target audience and trend analyses, social media managers will assist your team in curating marketing strategies.
They can assess your current strategies and techniques and modify them. Or they can help you come up with unique campaigns and higher-level strategies.
Brand Content Management
Social media managers can handle brand content development by planning content themes, creating posts, writing captions, developing creative briefs and maintaining a consistent brand voice and visual identity.
They’ll also coordinate with designers and creators to adapt content to different social media platforms, schedule posts and review content performance to improve future campaigns.
Community Engagement
Quality community engagement is the whole point of social media marketing.
Community engagement helps you create an open and interactive community of people who are interested in your products. It also helps in the lead generation process. Consistent and clear engagement can increase your brand credibility and encourage new customers to buy from you.
Social media managers can:
- Respond to comments and direct messages.
- Monitor brand mentions and conversations.
- Engage with followers and other brands through likes, comments and reactions.
- Answer customer queries and FAQs.
- Handle complaints and resolve basic issues.
- Keep your social media followers informed about new products, updates, sales, offers and announcements.
- Track community sentiment and feedback.
Tasks You Can Assign to Virtual Assistants
While social media managers specialize in handling social media, virtual assistants can handle various tasks for your business.
Depending on your needs, you can outsource any business function—administrative, creative or technical—to virtual assistants and stay stress-free!
Here’s a look at what VAs can do for your business.
Administrative Support
Aside from the various job-specific tasks, VAs can also perform all your daily administrative tasks for you. This helps you and your team stay organized and create space for priority tasks.
These include:
- Managing team calendars.
- Streamlining email inboxes.
- Conducting industry or competitor research.
- Recording accurate data in databases or CRMs.
- Organizing digital files.
- Coordinating tasks and projects between internal departments.
Social Media Management
In a world dominated by social media, understanding the power of platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok and X (Twitter) has become indispensable. Social media marketing offers unparalleled opportunities for businesses to engage with their target audience, build brand awareness and drive conversions.
Yasmin Walter, Multi-award-winning Entrepreneur
Leveraging compelling content, interactive features and targeted advertising, businesses can create impactful campaigns that resonate with their audience on a personal level.
However, in the ever-expanding digital landscape, standing out requires more than just a presence on social media. Savvy marketers are embracing new and hip ways of marketing, breaking away from conventional norms to capture attention and spark engagement.
With approximately 40% of consumers purchasing items from social media platforms, social commerce is very popular in the U.S.
Social media is a great place to create brand awareness, find high-intent leads and sell your products directly.
Successful digital marketing strategies rely on regular and consistent activity on social media platforms.
Social media virtual assistants can ensure all your posts attract and engage your target audience. They’ll also monitor comments, reply to posts, answer consumer questions and encourage conversation with suggestions and recommendations.
Marketing
Marketing efforts slowing down because your team is busy?
Virtual marketing assistants can help you with marketing tasks. They will:
- Conduct market and competitor research.
- Run email marketing campaigns.
- Write content for blogs, landing pages and marketing materials.
- Follow best SEO practices.
- Track campaign performance and create reports.
With VAs, your team will have time to focus on strategy, while your brand continues to attract customers and drive sales.
Graphic Design
Great visuals make your brand memorable. But creating them needs time and creative skills.
That’s when you should consider outsourcing graphic design tasks to a virtual assistant.
They will create brand-aligned visuals for social media graphics, marketing materials, infographics, brochures, presentations, websites, newsletters and more.
A graphic design VA keeps your visual content appealing, consistent and impactful, helping your brand stand out.
Customer Service
If you want your business to succeed, you need to invest time and effort to ensure your customers have a positive, satisfying experience with your brand. This is exactly what customer service is about.
But customer service is an intensive task and requires strong communication and interpersonal skills. VAs are communication specialists who can interact with your customers, be responsive, handle questions and even recommend your other products.
Technical Assistance
Want to keep your business running smoothly with reliable technical support behind the scenes?
A technical virtual assistant can do that! They will:
- Handle website updates and maintenance.
- Set up tools and software.
- Manage basic troubleshooting.
- Resolve technical issues in CRMs and databases.
- Handle basic cybersecurity and access control.
- Manage cloud storage and backup.
- Document all technical problems and FAQs.
Robust technical support from VAs keeps digital operations running without constant disruptions, preventing delays or security breaches.
Read More: 12 Businesses That Need Virtual Assistants
Social Media Manager vs Virtual Assistant: Who Is Right for You?
Now that you know all the major differences between social media managers and virtual assistants, the next step is to find out who you need to hire.
Start with assessing your daily processes. You need to take stock of the tasks that drain your productivity, hinder your efficiency and are simply out of your capacity.
If you are having trouble creating a list, here is a pro tip: create detailed standard operating procedures (SOPs).
SOPs are documents that detail a step-by-step layout of your daily work. Creating these documents can help you identify the weak points of your system, help you identify the kind of help you need and come in handy later when you finally start hiring.
If you want someone solely to manage your social media and have the budget for an in-house employee, you can go for a social media manager.
But remember, if you want your business to grow, you need to be smart about who you are hiring. This means ensuring that the value you add to your business is always more than your expenses.
The average base salary of social media managers is very high. Social media virtual assistants offer their services for way less than that. And you also enjoy other perks when you hire VAs.
Tips To Hire a Virtual Assistant
Now comes the easiest part—hiring.
If you are looking for talented VAs without going through the hassle of screening the hundreds of postings on the internet, wasting your time on double-checking qualifications and draining your resources with a lengthy and repetitive hiring process, you need to contact a virtual assistant agency like Zenius.
With such agencies, you can sort through a pool of pre-vetted, qualified and knowledgeable VAs. Dedicated experts help you find the perfect match for your business.
What’s more, with some companies you get additional benefits such as time zone overlap, easy replacements and scalable support.
All you need to do is refer to your SOPs and figure out what kind of virtual assistant you need. Note down the skills and qualities of your ideal VA and just match your requirements with our extensive list of candidates and that’s it!
FAQs
Whom should I hire: a social media manager or a virtual assistant?
If you’re looking for in-house support for social media tasks, go for a social media manager. A virtual assistant, on the other hand, is a better choice for businesses looking for cost-effective, flexible support for tasks based on your needs.
How do the costs compare between hiring a social media manager and a virtual assistant?
The cost of hiring a social media manager includes office space, utilities, equipment and employee benefits. Whereas virtual assistants are comparatively cost-effective since you don’t have to incur these overhead costs.
Is it safe to provide your social media account to your virtual assistant?
Yes! When you hire through a reputable VA agency, you work with reliable and trustworthy professionals who ensure secure account access and appropriate permissions.
What tasks can a social media virtual assistant handle?
A social media virtual assistant can oversee your social media accounts, perform tasks such as content creation, content calendar management, hashtag and algorithm research, campaign strategy management and performance monitoring and ensure your posts follow all brand guidelines.
How does a social media virtual assistant measure performance?
Your VA can measure social media performance by studying analytics such as engagement rates, follower growth, reach, impressions, ad performance results and audience feedback.
Final Thoughts
Virtual assistants are no longer just remote workers who provide administrative support. Today you can find many kinds of VAs, both for general and specialized tasks. From e-commerce VAs to data management VAs, there are plenty of niche areas where a VA can assist you.
SMM VAs are just like regular VAs but with a specialization in performing tasks related to social media management and marketing.
When you hire a VA over an in-house social media manager, you get more flexibility and more value for your money.
So give your business the support it needs to beat your competitors.
