Need Some Social Media Stress Relief? 4 Ways a Virtual Assistant Can Help

We hear a lot these days about the glorification of BUSY. Everyone is too busy to cook dinner (guilty!), too busy to work out (getting better at this one!), too busy to take care of ourselves (working on it!), and too busy to get all of our work done in the 24 hours we’re given in a day.

One of the best things I’ve learned as I have grown personally and professionally is that sometimes, we have to let ourselves off the hook and ask for help. If you don’t have time to cook dinner, try a meal order service. If you need to take some time just for you, ask a friend or family member to watch your kids/dog/whatever and get a massage or just drink a cup of coffee uninterrupted.

This principle applies to your work life, too. Maybe you need some help with managing your calendar or cleaning out your inbox on a daily basis. Asking for help can do wonders for your productivity and allow you to focus on your priorities.

Social Stress Relief

One of my favorite things about working on social strategy at Don’t Panic Management is being able to act as the stress-reliever for many of our clients when it comes to managing their social media.

When you are focusing on building and growing your business, it can be overwhelming to add posting to Facebook and Twitter to your list of things to do each day. Often, social media gets pushed to the side or lost in the shuffle. But reaching out and asking for a little bit of help, as you might do in other areas of your professional life, can help get your social presence back on track.

Whether you’re new to social media or a seasoned pro pressed for time, a virtual assistant can help customize an approach that will take a lot of the heavy lifting out of your hands AND help grow a qualified and engaged audience. Here are some of the tasks and strategies that I employ on a daily and weekly basis for my social media clients:

1. Content Curation, Post Writing, and Scheduling

The most frequent way that we assist our social media clients is through content curation, writing, and scheduling. It’s easy to scroll through your twitter feed and see what others are saying, but it’s tough to find the time to locate quality articles, write thoughtful posts, and schedule them on a regular basis. Plus, if you include graphic creation and finding the right hashtags, well, you’re talking about a lot of brain power that most CMO’s would probably rather spend elsewhere.

We get to know each of our clients’ voice, tone, and area of expertise in order to customize their content appropriately. And just because we are posting on behalf of our clients doesn’t mean they never chime in. We have several people who work with us to post real-time content while we manage the scheduled, day-to-day content curation for their accounts.

2. Proactive Follower Growth and Influencer Outreach

Building an audience for your organization or personal brand can seem daunting if you’re starting from scratch. And if you already have a large audience, maintaining the integrity of your community is just as important. We put time weekly (or daily) into our clients’ social media accounts to seek out connections that would be mutually beneficial and impactful for their brand. This takes a multi-layered approach of many “touches,” from following to retweeting and direct engagement. It takes time, but for us social media nerds, seeing the notification that “This user has followed you back” is extremely satisfying.

3. Brand monitoring and audience engagement

When we aren’t proactively growing our client’s audiences through identifying influencers, we monitor social media channels for opportunities to grow through authentic audience engagement. Many of our clients have large social followings and their audiences love engaging directly with them. We help manage the flow of communication by directly responding on our client’s behalf to questions, thoughts, and shout-outs from their audience.

With open communication with our clients and some handy social media tools, we’re able to monitor what’s being said about our clients and their brands and respond appropriately so that they don’t have to be always “ON” in today’s 24/7 social media world.

4. Community Management

More and more clients are building niche audiences on social media, and there are a lot of really cool ways that a VA can help establish, manage, and grow these types of communities. There are so many industries that can benefit from this, but I’ll give an example to help explain exactly how it might look.

Remote working is growing by leaps and bounds, especially in the tech and consulting industry, so there are a lot of opportunities for audience engagement outside of the regular channels that we would use to connect with people online.

Facebook Groups, Twitter chats, and webinars are growing in popularity as ways for brands and/or individuals to engage with a particular group of people while also creating content that could be seen by the masses.

A VA can do as much or as little in these types of communities as needed, but we often see full-scale maintenance as the best way to streamline and handle these situations.

From initial account set up to running online events in real-time, there are many options for clients to delegate social media responsibilities to their VA.

I love working with my clients to determine exactly where they need to be on social media and how we can build the best engagement strategy for their brand and audience. Each client is unique and different, so it’s never boring!

How could you use a virtual assistant to help you with social media? What’s one social media task that always seems to get overlooked in your world? We’d love to hear from you!