Getting A VA To Manage Your Social Media

  Why Would I Want My VA To Do It? There are two reasons for your VA to cover your social media. The first is the most obvious – you have better things to do with your time (well, unless your business IS social media). For most people, your time is better spent making sales calls, working with your team, taking care of reporting, and many other things. The second reason is the economics. Hiring a marketing agency can be expensive, and not all business can afford their services. This is where hiring your own VA is actually the most cost effective method if you do it right. Why Do Most Fail When It Comes to Using a VA For Social Media? Using VAs for social media isn’t always easy, and failure often comes down to lack of preparation. Making mistakes at first isn’t something to be surprised about, but you can easily minimise this and future mistakes. Set out rules and guidelines to set up your VA for success. Another reason for failure is lack of accountability. Many people throw their VA out there and simply say ‘Do my social media’, but when they try to figure out what’s working and what’s not, the lack of accountability means that if there aren’t results it just becomes a build-up of frustration. We encourage people to sort out accountability to make sure you’re gaining something from these platforms. The “What If?” In Social Media The ‘what if’ part is the concern that we don’t know how to do social media well. If you can’t do it well, how will you get your VA to do it better? This fear might have developed from having a go and not getting the results we were after, but that doesn’t mean this can’t be helped. An important part of social media is reporting. This will help you be an effective manager that can help your VA get it right. Get some key metrics that your VA can report on every month to see the progress and what has and hasn’t been working to go on from there. What If I Don’t Know the Social Media Channels I Need? This is a good task for your VA. The relevance of different social media platforms constantly changes, but at the moment, with 2016 coming to a close, the current big names are Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest, and evening blogging. ‘HOW’ to Do Social Media: Systems Now that we’ve covered the backdrop of why your VA should be doing your social media and how to overcome some small hurdles, let’s move onto ‘HOW’ to do social media. This is one of the keys to making sure that your VA can do the job better than you can. And this is all about having a system. We strongly discourage randomly posting, this rarely leads to any major value. Consistency is key, and the system is key to consistency. Here’s our basic system divided into four parts. The first three are commitments in the beginning that can be revisited at a later stage, whilst the fourth is the regular follow up you should be doing with your VA. 1. Your Rules Extract all the information in your head about your company. This will be the only way for your VA to know what is best for your social media branding, tone of voice, and even source of photos and news. Also, remember to let your VA know about certain things you can and cannot do in your industry (e.g. are there things you aren’t allowed to say or promote?). To put it simply: Your VA can’t help you brand unless they know your brand. 2. Who Is Doing It Well It’s worth spending some time looking into other companies and seeing what they’re doing on their social media. This is where to draw inspiration from, alternatively, your VA can do this step for you. 3. Your Competition This is a step we’d strongly encourage. You would have already searched up your competition to figure out what you do like, but then try to see what you can pick on so that your VA can do it better. 4. Monthly Plan We’d encourage setting up a monthly plan at the start of the month to be prepared for the following month. This way you’ll be ready for upcoming events as they pop up. The bigger aim of these monthly plans is being clear about what you want to achieve in that month, for example, promoting a particular product or service. By having that in mind, you’ll be able to structure your content to avoid spamming, and instead having well prepared content that won’t disrupt your regular schedule. We would be more than happy to share our questionnaire that elaborates this four-step system, so feel free to contact us for a copy. We hope that this was a useful, informative read. If you’d like to hear more about how Outsourcing Angel can make this entire social media process with VAs simple, get in touch with our team for a consultation and we can walk you through the entire process.