As a VA, you can become more time productive with your social media management. 

“I don’t have time for social media!” is what I hear so many VAs say. And this is partially true – you don’t have time. Time to waste on social media, that is!

So how do you make your social media activity productive instead of a massive time suck that brings you no rewards? To answer this, I’m focusing on the three main areas which I know that many people struggle with, so that you can avoid the same common mistakes.

The platforms you’re on

There’s no better way to waste time on social platforms than by choosing the wrong ones in the first place. It’s really easy to get carried away by the choice out there, but you can be a lot more effective – and find the process much more rewarding – by picking just two that you can do a good job on. And these two need to be where your ideal clients are hanging out.

So, for a virtual assistant, which would those be? My recommendation would be Twitter and Linkedin.  Of course, if you love Facebook – and Facebook groups especially can be great places to network – then go right ahead with that one. But the ideal thing about Twitter is the way it allows you to join targeted conversations that could benefit your business. And Linkedin, as everyone knows, is excellent for getting found by other business people.

For more tips on how you can find out if you’re already reaching the right kind of people, here’s a previous article of Ginny Carter which shows you how to analyse the audience on your accounts in detail.

The messages you’re putting out

Your key objective as a VA on social media is to put yourself across as being both knowledgeable and helpful. You’re a professional, and you want it to show! So your social media posts need to fall into two camps:

1.  Posts about yourself and how you can benefit your clients (these should be about 20% of your posts)

2.  Posts which provide useful information and are entertaining and helpful (these should be about 80% of your posts)

The first type of post can focus on your expertise, how you’ve helped others and the sorts of problems you can solve for your clients. Naturally this is great information to get across, but your audience won’t want to read about it all the time. One mistake I see being made is when people post this kind of stuff too often – which is a sure fire way to waste your efforts, as you could end up being ignored and unfollowed.

The second type of post is where you should focus most of your efforts. Here’s where your audience will find most value, so that when they’re ready to work with a VA, you’ve kept them engaged and will come top of their mind. So this type of posting, while it might seem like a waste of time, certainly isn’t. That’s as long as you’ve kept your topics relevant and useful.

The times you’re posting

Have you ever considered that you may be wasting many of your social media posts simply by making them at the wrong time? That would be a shame, as your content is valuable to both you and your audience.

Social media posts are ‘of the moment’ and once a certain amount of time has elapsed, they’re unlikely to get seen. So it makes sense to post when your audience is most likely to be around on the platforms.

To find out what times these are, you can use your intuition (you know your clients’ habits), the feedback you get from posting (when do you get most replies?), and your stats (Facebook is the only platform to provide these themselves, but there are third party tools you can use for Twitter).

Don’t worry about having to post at various times during the day. You can use Hootsuite to schedule your tweets and Linkedin status updates. And Facebook allows you to schedule your posts on the platform itself. Then your messages will get seen by the maximum number of relevant people – simple! And so much more effective than flooding your followers streams with loads of messages in one go.

From Starting Out to Fully Booked with The Social Media Manager Success Plan

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