In today’s digital marketplace, it's not enough to just have a website or a storefront anymore. If your business doesn't have a social media presence, the chances are you'll be giving your competitors an edge in reaching your audience. There are many benefits to your business having active social media accounts. For starters, it can provide cheaper advertising and greatly expand your potential customer base by making your business more accessible to those who might be interested in your products or services. Plus, it's a great way to stay up-to-date on current events and insights that might be important to your business.

But for many, social media is often a double-edged sword. On one hand, it is an incredible tool for communicating with customers. On the other, it can seem like an endless series of complicated decisions. Developing your content is one thing, but timing your posts and managing all the different channels are different things entirely.

But with so many things to juggle as an entrepreneur, what's the best way to ensure your business is regularly reaching your audience with regular posting and interaction with followers, while still having time to focus on everything else that’s on your plate?

A virtual assistant could be the easiest and most cost-effective solution.

What is a Virtual Assistant?

If you aren’t familiar with the concept of a virtual assistant, they are skilled professionals who are able to take repetitive administrative and executive tasks, such as scheduling, emailing, data entry, amongst others, off your hands so your valuable time and energy at work can be spent on growing your business.

Unlike an in-house employee, virtual assistants are fully remote and can be brought on board for as many or as few hours as you need, costing up to 90% less than hiring a full-time assistant.

See: 7 Ways A Virtual Assistant Can Help You Work Smarter

How a Virtual Assistant Can Help Across Social Media Platforms

Simply having an account for your business isn’t enough, you need to post consistently to look “alive”. If the demands of your business are pulling you in multiple directions and your to-do list is stacking up, it might seem hard to justify taking the time to create a post when there are other priorities at stake. So you decide you’ll post tomorrow. But this can be a slippery slope, and before you know it, your account hasn’t been active for days, weeks, or even months. If a potential customer stumbled upon your account only to find it inactive, it could raise questions as to whether your business is actively running too.

Luckily, there are various different ways a virtual assistant can help you to ensure this never happens.

However, it’s important to note that virtual assistants should be utilized to manage the tasks that eat away at your time and distract you away from focusing on the bigger picture. Think of them as an extra pair of hands for you and your business. While each assistant will have their own specific skills and proficiencies, if you are looking for help in areas like marketing strategy or branding, you would need a marketing consultant for that.

But you would be surprised how much of a difference can be made to your day by having even just a few less time-consuming tasks to worry about, safe in the knowledge they are being handled by an experienced professional.

Once you have the key elements in place, like planning out your content strategy and establishing brand guidelines, you can then start delegating specific tasks to your assistant.

Don’t forget to provide them with all the information they will need to carry out your tasks well, such as account log-in details and clear instructions.

Facebook

With approximately 2.89 billion monthly users, Facebook continues its reign as the world’s biggest social media platform and is one of the most popular sites for digital marketing. Their suite of advertising tools enables you to put your content in front of your ideal customers from all over the world through detailed audience targeting. Additionally, organic brand awareness and sales can be achieved through features such as Facebook Business Pages and Facebook Groups.

But, the more features you can take advantage of means more ways that your time can be used up, so a virtual assistant is invaluable to help you make full use of this platform without sacrificing time on your other important duties.

If you find yourself spending too long thinking up copy for your posts, your assistant could write it for you. If you can never seem to find the time to post, you can delegate this to your assistant. If the thought of compiling the results from your Facebook Ads campaigns fills you with dread, let your assistant handle it.

Instagram

The world’s most popular photo-sharing app is also a great place to showcase your business.

A highly visual platform, more attention needs to be given to the images or videos in your posts compared to other sites, as you are unable to post without a visual element. A virtual assistant with social media experience will likely have a good eye for sourcing quality images for your Instagram posts. Or better still, an assistant with graphic design experience could help you design bespoke images to post.

One of the benefits of social media is the ability to gain insights into your audience and monitor the conversations around your business or your industry. But taking the time to ensure you are always on top of your notifications can be highly distracting. With sufficient guidance, your virtual assistant could regularly check the comments on your posts or the messages in your inbox and respond accordingly. Another useful task could be to collate all the different aggregate data, such as the number of likes, comments, and shares your posts generate, to allow you to get straight to the analytics results without having to deal with the time-consuming data collection.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a growing space set apart from most other popular platforms by its focus on the professional lives of its users, which means that profiles and connections mainly include current and former work associates, certifications, business updates, and job vacancy information.

As a business professional, you may have already created a personal account for yourself to take advantage of its networking capabilities, but finding the time to maintain a business profile as well can be tough. This is where a virtual assistant can come in handy, as they could write content for engaging, informative updates to build your business’s reputation, as well as manage any updates to your company’s profile.

With the introduction of LinkedIn Live, this is another feature where a virtual assistant’s talents could be put to great use. Scheduling the digital event in your calendar, organizing invites, and even creating post-event deliverables like email newsletters or briefs could all be taken off your hands.

Twitter

Many view Twitter as the modern soap-box for today’s era, allowing individuals and brands alike to share their thoughts and news with the world, within its 280-character limit.

Due to the ‘viral’ nature of how content can be shared through the platform (you don’t have to follow an account for their posts to show in your feed), your products and services have the potential to reach a whole new audience every time you Tweet. Regular posting and responding to customer queries are key to a healthy Twitter presence, but this doesn’t have to be your personal responsibility. A virtual assistant can make sure your business’s voice is heard.

YouTube

Unlike the other platforms listed here, the only way to communicate with your prospective market on YouTube is through short-form videos. YouTube currently ranks just behind Facebook as the second-biggest social media platform with over 2.2 billion registered users, but as you don’t need an account to watch videos, this figure may underestimate the real number of YouTube’s users. For this reason, it is worth considering YouTube as part of your business’s marketing strategy if you haven’t already.

While not able to produce original content for your channel (this should be the job of your marketing team or an external agency), an experienced virtual assistant could help you research ideas for video content, write or proofread your captions, or upload your content to the site.

Final Thoughts

To get the most out of your virtual assistant, you need one that can deliver what you need. But going at this alone runs the risk of you wasting even more precious time trying to find the right candidate through trial and error.

At Time etc, we’re dedicated to helping you find the best virtual assistant for you and your business. Using our knowledge and expertise, we’ll carefully pair you with an assistant best-suited to take care of the tasks eating up your time.

On average, only the top 2% of assistants make it through our rigorous application process to join us, to give you peace of mind that you will only ever work with an experienced professional.

If you’re ready to join the 22,000 busy people that have already used a virtual assistant from Time etc to get more done, then find out more below and take the first step towards achieving more…