Stop Doing Social Media Yourself and Grow Your Business

More than 460 small business owners, CEO’s and proprietors were asked how much time they spend managing their social media account. Here are the results:

• 63% spend 1-5 hours online
• The rest spend more than five hours
• Some spend as much as 21 hours a week or more

21 hours a week! That’s over half of a normal work-week. It’s no wonder that the number one gift every entrepreneur, small business owner or CEO asks for is more time. There’s got to be another way.

The amount of time spent on social media can be recovered if you outsource it to a Virtual Assistant. Outsourcing this task is not only beneficial but mandatory for anyone who is serious about growing their business.

How to work with a Virtual Assistant to manage your social media

Businesses have good intentions when creating their social media pages, but often these pages lack direction in content and structure. They’re not using a content posting schedule and therefore cannot measure the true benefits of their efforts.

A Virtual Assistant can help you to develop a content posting schedule for all your social media accounts. This schedule can include posting times, content that she will post, engagement received after posting and more. No longer do you have to wonder what the true effect of your posts are as she will manage that for you.

“Remember that building an audience takes time.”

I am always bewildered by entrepreneurs who expect their social media accounts to grow overnight. Building a social media presence takes time, and hiring a short-term freelancer on Fiverr will not work. Purchasing likes on the web will not help either. All you will get is a bunch of ghost followers who don’t engage with your content. You’ve got to build your audience organically.

Before you hand over your social media accounts to a Virtual Assistant, make sure you outline the best practices. Best practices include:

• How often you want posts to go live
• If she should respond to comments
• The topics that should be frequently explored
• The topics that are off limits
• How often you should get draft posts sent to you for review
• Which automated tool you will use to publish posts (Hootsuite, Buffer or the internal scheduling tool)

Other ways to use a Virtual Assistant to manage your social media

A Virtual Assistant is also useful to engage with your audience’s comments and queries. Often, people leave ‘angry’ comments on social media due to its public nature and therefore impact, so you’ve got to keep on top of that to diffuse situations. Your Virtual Assistant can schedule to receive email notifications for comments, direct messages and tags. She can then follow those notifications to respond to them. Not everyone is aware of customer service etiquette, so have a template ready for the following situations:

• Complaint
• General query
• Sales

Here’s a typical response to a complaint:

Dear Sir,

We sincerely apologise for the bad service you have experienced. Please give us your details in a direct message and we will contact you to solve this issue. Alternatively, you can email complaints@hello.com and we will solve this issue with a matter of urgency. Kind Regards. Admin

These templates will ensure that your Virtual Assistant will not get involved in an argument on any of your social media accounts.

When it comes to finding out who’s talking about your company, a Virtual Assistant can do this too. She can use Tweetdeck, Google Alerts or Mention.net to do this easily.

Finally, it is advised to use a password sharing tool such as LastPass to share social media passwords securely with your Virtual Assistant.