Congratulations on your new gig as a social media virtual assistant. You could not have chosen a better and more exciting field of specialization as a virtual assistant. Now, you can use your skills and passion for socializing with others to earn some money.
You now have an opportunity to work with clients who will expect you to build a social media presence for their brands. They will expect you to take advantage of the various social media platforms to increase their brand recognition.
They will also need your expertise to help them use social media to generate new leads and creatively market their products and services.
Why Do You Need Social Media Tools?
Such is a question best answered if we discuss the specific tasks you will be performing for your clients as a social media virtual assistant. Those tasks include:
Creating a client's social media profile
Interacting with audiences on various social media channels
Developing high-quality, engaging content
Scheduling posts
Creating and managing social media campaigns
From the look of things, these are quite a lot of tasks to handle in a few hours. And there is a possibility they may increase depending on each client's needs. Now imagine that you are serving several clients who want you to perform these similar tasks repeatedly.
Luckily, you have the technology to help make things simpler for you. Here is when you need the power of social media tools to help you perform these tasks efficiently and for less time.
Here are some of the tools you can use in your social media virtual assistant gig.
HootSuite
Remember how we said you will manage various social media accounts for a client? How will you keep tabs on each account to ensure all audiences are engaged?
HootSuite is the answer to this question. The tool enables you to integrate all your social media accounts into a single dashboard. Imagine accessing all the client's social media accounts in one click? Isn't your job becoming more exciting by the minute?
Once you have all the accounts integrated, it becomes easier to manage their profiles, event, pages, and any groups you may have created. Moreover, you can now create, schedule, and track posts across multiple social media platforms from your HootSuite dashboard.
Canva
By now, you should know that images and videos attract more engagement on social media than plain text. That is why you need to be more interested in posts that come with memes or videos. Developing such graphical content requires the use of tools such as Canva.
Canva is a graphic design platform that allows you to make various types of visual content. The graphical content you can create using this tool includes promotional materials, banners, posters, GIFs, videos, images, and covers. It is also one of the simplest tools to use as it contains ready-to-use templates and formats.
A simple definition of Canva would be a tool that enables everyone to be a designer. Imagine that it even contains a database of photos, stickers, animated elements, and fonts that you need in designing your social media graphics. Even better, it is available as a free version that contains more than the basic tools you need for your design project.
Buffer
Do you expect to be waking up every day and creating daily posts for all your social media management clients? Of course not. You will be setting aside one or two days to create posts that you will post on the clients' social media channels for a month. Also, no one expects you to be manually posting the posts you have created daily.
Buffer is the social media management tool to do that for you. It allows you to schedule your content and post it when your target audience is online. That helps increase your content's engagement with the client's target audience. The tool contains three essential features.
Buffer publish- it provides for the multichannel posting and a social media content calendar
Buffer reply- it allows you to manage interaction with the audiences
Buffer analyze- it provides insightful market reports and analytics. You can use it to set up customized templates for monitoring your marketing KPIs.
Sprout Social
As you grow in your new social media virtual assistant gig, you will start dealing with clients who have larger businesses. Therefore, you will need tools to perform complex tasks associated with your business.
Sprout Social is one of those tools. It allows you to connect the business with its users and improve communication between them. The tools permit automated content posting, engagement, and analytical capabilities on social media channels. You can rely on this tool to perform the following tasks on a largescale basis.
Content planning- it allows you to map content themes and optimize the content you post on the social media networks
Campaign management- in case you are running a social media campaign, you can use it to monitor, prioritize, collaborate and respond to all messages from a single inbox
SproutSocial Analytics- enables you to receive customized reports related to your social media campaign performance.
BuzzSumo
If you want to increase engagement on your social media posts, you must find content that interests your target audiences. That is one of the toughest ask for a social media virtual assistant. How do you find content that will always be attractive to your target audience?
BuzzSumo is a content marketing tool that can make it easier to find the right content for your audience. It does this by analyzing numerous content and providing comprehensive data that helps you know what to post. Therefore, it contains features such as.
Content insights- it enables you to search for content that is popular on all social media networks
BuzzSumo's influential search- provides you with insight into what influential people are sharing; hence easier to know when to use them for your promotions
Query- you can use BuzzSumo to notify you when content is published containing a particular keyword of interest to you.
Competitive analysis- BuzzSummo offers you a sneak peek into what your competitors are doing. You can use it to know when your competitors are mentioned and by whom.
Other Tools You Should Use as a Social Media Virtual Assistant
Numerous tools can improve your competence and efficiency as a social media virtual assistant. We cannot discuss them all here. However, there is a place you can learn about them all, including how to use these tools.
Sign up and become a member of the Royal VA Community. Here, you will know all the tools to improve how you help your clients.