You need an extra marketing push to get your name out to more potential customers, but you’re not a marketing expert?
How do you create a digital marketing strategy through social media without hiring an entire marketing department?
Consider a social media virtual assistant to take care of this for you while saving money on labor costs!
Why Social Media?
A whopping 71%, nearly three-fourths, of social media users, are more likely to purchase products and services due to a social media referral from one of their friends, according to a report from Search Engine Watch in 2020.
Facebook has nearly 1.3 billion active daily users and 2.9 billion active monthly users, social media offers a HUGE canvas to paint your brand’s picture.
Instagram continues to grow in popularity in favor of visual representations for your brand. Twitter is still worth looking into. Both YouTube and TikTok continue to be popular ways to connect visually with users. LinkedIn is great for professional types and professional brands.
You need to leverage your social media based on your target audience and how they consume information.
Know Your Target Audience
A social media virtual assistant understands how to get to the bottom of your target audience, whether you’re a hyperlocal coffee shop or an e-commerce brand.
Your initial strategy starts by knowing the target audience and your competitors.
What does your competitor’s social media presence look like? How many followers do they have? What posts were popular with their target audience? What are the ages and demographics of your competitor’s audience?
A virtual assistant specialized in social media can help you gather data and information on your target audience easily and effectively.
Then you can start to generate content that appeals to your small business target audience.
What Social Media Should I Use?
Once you see what your competitor does for social media, you can mirror their efforts or branch out to something new and different.
Your chosen social media should be popular with your target audience while also allowing you to convey brand messages effectively in your style.
Facebook. Just about everyone knows Facebook. This gigantic social media platform also has robust metrics a social media expert can leverage when generating data for Facebook advertising. Even if you don’t run Facebook ads, the metrics you tap into can help you tailor messaging to your target audience.
TikTok. has soared in popularity since 2020. This platform uses short videos, usually less than a minute, to convey a message. It’s extremely popular with teens and people in their early 20s. Recently, the social media outlet announced people could post videos up to 10 minutes long (to compete with YouTube). The idea is to watch snappy, witty videos conveying messages through humor, music, and voiceovers in under 30 seconds. TikTok allows you to summarize your messages in very short videos.
LinkedIn. has decent targeting metrics, but it falls short compared to Facebook. However, LinkedIn is great if you want to convey your brand message to professionals, C-suite execs, business owners, and department heads.
YouTube. continues to be popular because users upload videos to the platform of 500 hours of new content per minute. YouTube also has 2 billion active users per month.
Instagram. uses photo messaging to edify brands using a single image, series of images, a short video, or a story.
A social media virtual assistant does not only understands how to use these platforms effectively, but that person also knows how to delve into the metrics of these platforms when needed.
Social Media Tools
Several social media tools on the market today help a virtual assistant gauge how best to present your messaging.
Analytics tools can look at several metrics regarding every social media channel, not just individuals to:
● Examine a brand’s presence on social media.
● Determine how many social media shares are out there.
● See how much that brand’s voice compares to the competition.
● Figure out the brand’s positive or negative response based on social media replies.
● Fill in content gaps and suggest ways to leverage various social media for your benefit.
● Measure conversions.
● Schedule social media posts for the appropriate times to capture a larger target audience.
Your chosen social media virtual assistant understands these tools to make your campaign more efficient from the strategy phase to completion.
Developing a Strategy
Once you dive into social media metrics, your social media virtual assistant develops a strategy.
You can parse out the strategy over a year, six months, quarter, month, or week. It’s up to you and how effective you want the campaign to be.
Sometimes, posting once per week is sufficient. Other social media platforms might require posting once per weekday for maximum reach. It depends on what your metrics find.
One key component of the strategy is to monitor the performance of your posts. Once you gather more data, you can begin to tailor and refine your strategy more and more. Your virtual assistant is the perfect person to keep track of all this!
Creating Content
After you develop a strategy, it’s time to create content.
A social media virtual assistant can create and schedule content for posting. The key here is to be authentic in your messaging that’s on-brand.
While your virtual assistant might work well for posting written content, chances are you’ll have to come up with photos and videos for the virtual assistant to post.
All it takes is you sending the photos and videos for the person to use across your brand messaging. Keep in mind, the same videos and images could work across multiple platforms. They just might need different format requirements.
Your social media virtual assistant will understand how to accomplish this.
Schedule the content based on your needs, and make sure the content stays at a consistent cadence every day or week. For example, if you post every Thursday at 7 a.m., keep it that way every week.
Managing Your Social Media Presence
Once the content is out there, a social media virtual assistant manages your social media presence.
The person responds to inquiries based on your brand messaging, including responses for customer service and questions about your products or services. The person can also respond to reviews on Facebook, Yelp, Google My Business, and other platforms.
In general, your Social Media assistant can also update your pages by changing the hours, phone number, products, services, and business description based on your needs.
Your chosen Social Media virtual assistant also understands how to tweak a strategy once responses, likes, and shares come in.
Why Should You Hire a Social Media Virtual Assistant?
Are you an entrepreneur or small business owner with no time for social media marketing? Do you need to hire an expert on social media without the need to bring on full-time staff?
Then outsourcing a social media virtual assistant might be the right option for you.
Your chosen vendor vets the right candidate first and gives you options for the person who will help you manage your brand effectively.
Hiring a company whose specialty includes social media provides a cost-effective method to add a social media expert to your team without hiring a full-time staff with benefits.
Talk to us today about how we can save your company money while helping you grow in your target market.
A social media virtual assistant might be right for your small business as an entrepreneur.
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