Social Media Manager or a Virtual Assistant

Hi Pretties. Welcome to this episode thank you so much for joining me today. Today, I really want to talk to you about how your virtual assistant is very likely not a social media strategist. I’m just going to let that land, it sounds harsh, but this is coming from a place of love. And if you are a VA listening to this, please know that you are adored and this is not a slight on you whatsoever.

What this is, is hopefully a little bit of an education in terms of what can be expected in a business relationship, and what is outside of the scope have certain business relationships in order to serve everybody more wholly, and for there to be less disappointment across the board. So what we see quite regularly is that when you get to the stage where you’re ready for somebody else to support you in your business, you’re going to be looking for somebody to be possibly some sort of admin support. And during that admin support journey, you’re going to be looking for people who call themselves virtual assistants now let it be known that virtual assistants and PAs and virtual PAs and business operation managers and you know, just all of the team are, it’s just the most beautiful thing in the world, if you can onboard somebody to come and support you and your business its, first of all, it’s a real honour to be able to have that relationship with somebody and bring somebody into your business and to work with somebody who would be there to support you like it’s just a beautiful thing. So first and foremost, it that is wonderful.

And you know, virtual assistants are like angels, they come and they help and they jump in where they’re needed. They help in terms of admin tasks, they can help with bookkeeping, they can help with emails, they can help with sales processes, they can help with invoices, they can help with chasing if you’ve got late payments. But what really is often kind of advertised in terms of vacancies is I want a virtual assistant who is charging no more than 10 pounds an hour or 15 pounds an hour who can do my social media. And I want to kind of caveat by saying that you can have a virtual assistant help you with your social media and that is fine. I’m not suggesting that a virtual assistant can’t help you with your social media, of course, as long as they know how to use the platform. And you have things in place in terms of what you want to share the physical doing from a virtual assistant is absolutely possible.

But what we see quite regularly and this is something that we have noted for a long time, but it does seem to be getting kind of more wide known is that actually quite a lot of the time people believe that a virtual assistant will come and do their social media and then they can expect a higher level of performance from their social media than if they were doing it themselves. Now, there will be virtual assistants out there that are qualified to some degree or experienced to some degree in social media that obviously as with every skill, there will be varying degrees of skill here but what I’m trying to say is on the vast generalisation when it comes to using virtual assistants for your business, you really cannot rely on the fact that somebody that is a virtual assistant will know what to do in terms of marketing strategy. Your social media is part of your digital marketing strategy. I know that won’t be breaking news, but it is definitely something to remember when you are passing this task over. You wouldn’t necessarily go to a virtual assistant and ask them to file your tax return and expect the same results as you would a qualified accountant. However, there is this kind of known ideal that if you go to a virtual assistant for your social media, then perhaps you are getting the same as you would if you went with an agency. And unfortunately, that’s just not the case.

Now, VAs are amazing, they are fantastic. And they are definitely, definitely, definitely something that we should all be incredibly grateful for. And there are those VAs that start off with all sorts of different tasks, that then find a way to niche into a particular task, or they may even be able to update their credentials, they may be able to have qualifications. I know we train VAs in social media strategy. And you will find that there are a network of virtual assistants that do have a little bit more in the way of social media strategy or digital marketing strategy in a bit of a wider net. And one of the things that I would just suggest is that if you do have a virtual assistant, or if you were thinking of going down that route, just make sure that you have the opportunity to really chat to that virtual assistant and find out what it is that they are happy to do, what they’re experienced in, and also what their credentials are, and experience is in that area.

You can’t expect a VA, as wonderful as they are, to have this same understanding as a social media strategist or as a high level marketer. You just can’t.  A social media manager is also somebody who is considered to have the right experience level to actually execute digital marketing practices. So even by having a VA that says that they can be your social media manager, if they don’t have that experience already, and they don’t have a natural affinity that they’ve been able to really triple down on and you know, release as a strength, then actually, you may be asking too much from that support. And the reason why this is really important to talk about is because there’s absolutely no reason why there needs to be disappointment in this area. And we have VAs come to us all of the time wanting to be trained up to a higher level so that they can get more clients. And so they can service the clients that they’ve got with more confidence and make sure that actually what they are producing for their clients is top quality work. And I applaud the VAs that look at these areas, where they know that they are making a massive difference to their clients. And they go in and learn more so that they can just be all round in a better space in a more positive space in that area.

But what has happened quite recently, and what seems to be happening quite a lot is that virtual assistants are being given a bad rep for not being able to produce quality leads based off the social media support that they are giving. And that’s not fair like you can’t actually go to somebody who isn’t qualified in an area, pay them 25% of what somebody who was qualified in the area would charge and then be annoyed when you don’t get the results that you were hoping to get. So this is about expectation. And it’s just a little bit about what is become almost like a generally known thing, which actually isn’t true. The same way is you may not get the highest qualified graphic designer on Fiverr, you’re not going to get the highest qualified social media strategist, and/or Digital Marketer from somebody who is in the VA space.

Now, you can’t be annoyed if you don’t get a return on investment, you can’t be annoyed if that person can’t give you key performance indicators. You can’t be annoyed if that person doesn’t know what the right thing to do for your business is in terms of consulting and giving you support over what you need. You are the expert in yourself, but you may not be the expert in your market for your business. And although it is a beautiful thing for you to have control of your own visibility. And we always, always, always, always love a triple down on a personal branding situation. We love those brands where the person and the brand are one. And it’s really easy because people do buy from people and people do feel like they trust a brand more if there’s a face to the brand if there’s a person there and it does make a massive difference.

However you would not expect to get in a plane tomorrow and know how to drive it. And that’s the same with your digital marketing. If you don’t have a marketing manager if you don’t have somebody who is strategizing on your behalf if you don’t have people who know how to extract the right data from market research and use it to your benefit. You know, if you don’t have people in your team yet for whatever reason, then you can’t expect to get the same results from your own social media. If you’re running it and you don’t have that understanding than you would if you did have those people in your business. And it’s the same with virtual assistants, you can’t expect just because it says social media on their resume, that that will tick that box, you do need somebody, whether that’s something that you learn yourself or whether you find yourself a VA that has that higher level criteria in this particular area, you do need to make sure that you’re really looking into that, because it’s not fair to expect for somebody who has absolutely no chance of knowing any of that stuff to be the person who is now solely responsible for your whole strategy. And the reason why it’s so important is because, you know, in terms of investment, business investments are far and few between in terms of the ones that actually can grow with you over time and time and time. Obviously, training is one of them. Anything that you can learn, especially anything that you have lifetime access to can be really, really good, because you can just return back to it at any point, you can refresh it, and you can keep that and that knowledge, you just never know how instrumental that knowledge will be to the growth of your business. It might come out in six months, you might be like, wow, I’m so glad that I knew that I might come out in four years, and be like, oh, that’s come from that stage when I did that learning, and now it’s still here with me. You just don’t know.

Okay, when it comes to social media, when it comes to digital marketing, you absolutely do know, you absolutely do know, it’s a given. It’s like an advertising spend. It’s an absolute given. So you don’t have to worry about whether when you invest in these things, whether they will be helping your business, you just need to understand that sometimes they don’t necessarily immediately turn into sales straight away, they’re always going to be of some advancement to your business, even if it is just invisibility and reach and brand awareness, you’re always going to get more for your money when you invest in these areas. And if you invest really intentionally and you have a really good understanding of what it is that you need to do, and you have a strategy that you’re working towards, it makes it really, really easy. And that is why I think it’s really important that we make sure we know the difference between what we’re actually asking for and what we can expect. Because what happens when you hire somebody who doesn’t have that experience, has absolutely no way of knowing how to support you in that area. At the level you are requesting, then what happens is disappointment for everybody disappointment for you, when the results aren’t there disappointment for them when it gets to the stage where you’re having to then either take that job off them or cancel contracts or not work with them in the future. And there’s really no need for that to happen, especially in a situation where you can learn more about these things quite easily. And we have lots and lots of virtual assistants that come to us to learn social media strategy. And we will be adding a database of all of the virtual assistants that have been through our Audience Attraction programme soon, which is very exciting.

And so I will be able to steer those of you who are looking for a VA to support in the area towards VAs have the right opportunity and experience to be able to support you. But in the meantime, do have a little think about what you are requesting when you’re taking somebody on like this because it’s very, very easy to over expect and be really, really disappointed and that is a lose-lose for everybody. Whereas if you go for somebody and you’re very clear on your expectations, then it can only ever be a win-win.

Okay Pretties, I hope that will help you in your pursuits for potentially bringing on virtual assistants in terms of your social media support. Of course, if you would like social media support our agency is always open in terms of speaking about whether we are the right fit for you quite often we are on wait list but we have many wait lists and we do have people joining us all of the time people are getting through our training programmes all of the time, and we are just expanding all of the time. So if you wanted to reach out to us, we would love that and you can do that by joining our group which will be in the description and/or emailing me at dawn@ beyondthedawnblogger.com.   It has been wonderful speaking to you guys about this today. And I hope you’ve enjoyed this mini bite session and I will see you next time.

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