Key Takeaways

A business that’s visibly there for its customers is always rewarded with long-term customer loyalty and goodwill.

You can post high-quality content, maintain consistency and grow an engaged community that connects with your brand with a social media VA.

With their help, you can also set up integrated retail stores on Instagram, Facebook and other platforms.

When 5.07 billion people worldwide are on social media, you need to meet them there.

However, to stay relevant and grow engagement, you have to spend hours online every day.

You also need to create graphics, edit videos, respond to comments, stay updated on trending hashtags, handle queries, follow up with leads and go live on Instagram frequently.

Who has that kind of time?

Getting the right help for social media can make all the difference. But if you hire an in-house social media manager in the US, it can cost up to $58,266 per year!

The best move forward is to delegate all your nitty-gritty social media tasks to a virtual assistant!

Why Invest in Social Media Marketing

Modern buyers of all ages are primarily online now. As such, today’s consumer journey has shifted gears and pushed social media to take center stage.

So it’s not just a tool for communication anymore. Social media has become a crucial sales channel for businesses.

A powerful social media strategy has been helping various brands corner the market! They’re boosting brand awareness and tapping young markets full of potential.

When you have help with social media, you can post high-quality content, maintain consistency and grow an engaged community that connects with your brand.

This is why, if you want social media success, you need to invest in a social media virtual assistant.

What Are Social Media Virtual Assistants?

Virtual assistants (VA) come in many shapes and sizes. Social media is one of the most popular tasks for which they’re hired.

A social media VA helps businesses grow through effective content creation, community engagement and marketing.

They can help you manage multiple social media accounts, post & schedule content and handle promotions on social platforms.

Some of their many tasks include planning posts, creating graphics, writing captions, scheduling content, monitoring analytics, researching the latest trends, interacting with potential customers and increasing community engagement.

There are various benefits of hiring a virtual assistant for social media. These include but are not limited to:

Cost-effectiveness: You can save bucks by hiring an offshore social media virtual assistant instead of an expensive in-house team.

Time management: You don’t have to waste time on draining social media tasks.

Core business expansion: You can reinvest the time and money you save into growing the business.

Brand visibility: You can establish a strong brand identity and become a leader in your niche.

More sales: You can direct traffic to your website and generate more leads through social channels.

Insights: By leveraging social media analytics, you can also learn about your target audience’s purchasing behavior and alter your approach for maximum conversions.

Community: You can attract a loyal customer base that connects to your brand.

What Can a Social Media Virtual Assistant Do for My Business?

From small businesses to startups, almost any business can benefit from a virtual assistant.

But what can virtual assistants do for you?

You can delegate daily tasks to your social media virtual assistant. This way, you get to innovate ideas and implement them, while your VA can help these inventions reach your niche audience.

1. Content Creation

You can delegate all your content creation tasks to your social media virtual assistant. Simply give them details on the concept, content type, design guidelines and a deadline.

But before the posts go out, you need to plan content as per your audience’s tastes and preferences. This is necessary to align social media posting with your higher business goals.

What platform does your target audience use? While LinkedIn’s and Instagram’s largest user base is Millennials, Gen Z uses TikTok the most.

What type of content is most appealing to your target audience? For instance, Gen Z and Millennials spend the most time on short-form video content.

Your virtual assistant can post on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter) and more.

They can create graphics, edit short videos and coordinate live videos. So Instagram reels, LinkedIn posts and Facebook posts are places you can shine.

If you want, they can also use ChatGPT to generate text, captions, posts and video ideas.

They can also share behind-the-scenes videos or create valuable posts about your internal business practices to establish authenticity.

Repurposing existing content across platforms can boost the reach of good-quality content and increase its active lifespan.

2. Schedule

Once a content plan is in place, you can hand over everything to your social media virtual assistant.

Read your engagement metrics, determine when your audience is most active and ask your VA to post at these times.

They can even automate posting using various social media tools like HubSpot and Sprout Social.

So if your target group is based in a different timezone, your VA can convert that time slot into your local time and schedule the post for that time. This way, your posts can still show up on your audience’s feed during their active time.

Social media VAs understand the value of authenticity on social media. So they’ll avoid sticking to a strict bot-like routine.

You can either let the virtual assistant handle it themselves or get them to approve posts with you before scheduling them.

In scheduling, your virtual assistant will always prioritize quality over quantity. So you can rest assured that they would rather post valuable content multiple times a week—than post seven times a week for the sake of posting.

As Steve Jobs said, one home run is always better than two doubles!

3. Research

Research is a key strategy for social media management. You must know the market in and out.

A social media virtual assistant can research your competitors. With this valuable information, you can:

• Benchmark your services.
• Understand your shortcomings.
• Find loopholes in competing businesses.
• Offer better services to customers.
• Learn about popular marketing practices of your niche.
• Use tried-and-tested techniques others are using.
• Adopt unique techniques that set you apart.

Your VA can also research your target audience and create buyer personas.

For example, suppose your VA finds that your target audience consists of college students living in the United States. In this case, you can plan content that is relevant to this demographic.

Social media virtual assistants can also research hashtags and ideas for new posts. By creating content on trendy and viral topics, your VA can help you strike while the iron is hot!

4. Promotions and Analytics

Your virtual assistant can strike the right balance with both organic and sponsored content. This is important to crack the social media code of success.

When you create a high-quality engaging post and it gets good traction, ask your VA to run it as an ad and keep it floating for long-term traffic.

When you promote high-quality posts, your products get the limelight they deserve and you get higher returns on your ad spend!

The social media VA can also track metrics to make data-driven business decisions.

Suppose your virtual assistant tells you that as per analytics, your content is suddenly attracting an unexpected demographic. Thus, to secure newer leads in this target group, you can alter your marketing approach to serve them better.

The virtual assistant can also collect important metrics like:

• Likes
• Comments
• Impressions
• Shares
• Saves
• View time
• Followers
• Profile visits
• Reach
• Mentions
• Reposts
• Bio link clicks

Using a feature in Meta, your virtual assistant can run A/B tests by posting two copies of the same content with minor variations. These tests help you understand what works and doesn’t work with your audience.

This is how social media virtual assistants can test the waters so that you can plan future strategies!

5. Brand Awareness and Community Engagement

Trust is important in business. Especially when there’s so much competition in the market and customers have hundreds of options.

If they don’t see your credibility in what you sell, they’ll simply take their business elsewhere.

Thanks to your virtual assistant’s support, you can post genuine, valuable content and boost brand awareness.

Get them to align the message you’re sending out across platforms. With integrated marketing, you can reach more people and streamline customer experience.

The VA can also engage with your community on your behalf.

They can assume your brand voice while interacting with followers, responding to comments and providing them with any help they may need.

They can post interactive content, use polls and questions on stories or create a buzz with campaign hashtags.

Ask your virtual assistant to reshare testimonials and create fun giveaway contests for customers. This will encourage followers to share your content with their friends. Word of mouth can create a powerful ripple in the market!

Such user-generated content never fails to provide social proof. Hence, social media virtual assistants never forget to repost!

6. Lead Generation

Yes, you can convert new customers on social media. All it takes is a well-thought-out strategy!

Your social media virtual assistant can add links to sponsored posts. This way, you can connect powerful platforms like Facebook, X, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok to your official website and convert multifold leads!

Another way to gain more sales is by supporting your buyers throughout purchasing. After all, a business that’s visibly there for its customers is always rewarded with long-term customer loyalty and goodwill.

The VA can actively respond to new queries and follow up and update older leads with info on new products, offers and sales running on your store.

However, directing leads to your website isn’t your only option!

With the help of your VA, you can also set up integrated retail stores on Instagram, Facebook and other platforms and get orders there.

Let your virtual assistant handle product listings, data collection, invoices and more!

Using this feature, they can also create shoppable posts that feature your products. People can click on these photos to view product prices, measurements, etc.

Your buyers can easily place orders for the same in a matter of minutes!

Hiring a Social Media Virtual Assistant

Here’s everything you should keep in mind to hire your social media VA the right way.

Define Your Needs

Before hiring a virtual assistant, you need to understand the scope of your requirements.

What kind of support are you looking for? What tasks will the new VA need to work on? Are you looking for a social media expert?

Outline all such needs in a job description and share it with an outsourcing agency of your choice. There are hundreds of options to choose from.

But only a reliable agency like Zenius can jump-start hiring for you right away. Once you share your requirements with us, we can start our search for the best candidates for you!

Screen Thoroughly

From this shortlisted set of candidates, we send over candidates who pass our expert-vetted qualifying assessments.

At Zenius, your satisfaction is our number one priority. So we welcome you to participate in the screening process as much or as little as you’d like.

You can also interview the candidates yourself. Ask insightful questions to understand the candidate’s skills, personal qualities and professional character.

Here are the skills you should look for in a social media virtual assistant:

• Basic graphic design
• Basic video editing
• Basic copywriting
• Customer communication
• Research

Here are the tools they should be familiar with:

• Canva
• ChatGPT
• Meta Business Suite
• Social media management tools like Publer, Buffer or Sprout Social

During the interview, keep a scorecard and give points to each answer. This will come in handy during final discussions. Be mindful of any biases and make a well-thought-out choice.

Once you’ve made a decision, you can let the agency know.

Sign the Contract

When everything is finalized, you can proceed toward signing the agreement.

This is a good time to review the terms. Make sure the contract is free of errors and reflects your needs. This is important to avoid future confusion.

Onboard Properly

Before your new virtual assistant joins, you should prepare training materials, document relevant processes and create SOPs and other policy documents.

This way, you can familiarize and ease them into the workflow.

Onboarding is a foundational stage that determines the kind of working relationship you both will develop. As such, be as thorough as possible here.

Start Delegation

Right before you delegate your first task, discuss your social media goals with your new virtual assistant.

What do you want to achieve through socials? Are you looking for more reach, more followers, more sales or more brand awareness?

Decide on the key performance indicators (KPIs) your virtual assistant should be tracking. KPIs help measure the success of the strategy and track the progress towards your social media goals.

Share some strategies you have in mind to achieve these goals. These are productive discussions that will clarify the bigger picture to your new VA.

Choose which platforms you want them to focus on more. Grant them access to your social accounts.

Remember to start with smaller tasks and build up from there. Give actionable feedback on all these tasks for smooth improvements.

You can begin the journey by sending them the first week’s content plan with a proper schedule.

To manage their tasks every day, you can choose a task management tool like Asana or Trello. Don’t forget to decide on a dedicated communication channel like Slack and meet every week to discuss strategy.

Wrapping Up

Social media success is not easy to crack. It can take up hours every week just to stay active.

If business owners started focusing on social profiles, they wouldn’t have time to work on overall business growth. What good is social media traction if the overall business is suffering?

Clearly, then, you need someone to handle social media while you work away.

A virtual assistant can help you plan a social media strategy, learn about the market, promote your products, make more sales and establish your brand presence. With their support, it’s easy to hop on the trend bandwagon and earn social clout.

Hire a social media virtual assistant from Zenius for hassle-free recruitment.