You have probably heard that social media is about authenticity, sincerity, and transparency.  To get the most out of your efforts takes a time commitment.  Possibly a time commitment that you are not willing to make at this point.

The answer might be working with a Social Media Virtual Assistant.  (SMVA)  I know, you aren’t looking for someone to go out and impersonate you on line.  That just seems wrong.  You want to be the one that maintains control over your image, your business or your brand. And that’s the way it should be.

The beauty of using an SMVA is that your image and message can be authentically yours while someone else takes care of the routine tasks and chores of social media.

There are no hard and fast rules about what an SMVA does for you.  Depending on your level of participation and your personal need to be “hands-on”, the SMVA can:

  • Set up your social media profiles, such as a new Twitter account, Facebook fan page or LinkedIn profile.
  • Cleanup and optimizing an existing  account, fan page or profile.
  • They can “vet” followers and friends on the various platforms and weed out the spammers and lurkers, while solidifying the connection and adding value for your customers.
  • The SMVA can do research, such as finding groups for you to join and questions to answer for these groups to help establish you as an “expert” in the area. They can research where your target audience might be hanging out online, find and follow industry trends by monitoring websites and blogs.  They can also set up systems that track what your competitors are doing.
  • Blogging: if you enjoy writing, blogging can be fun. If you hate writing, it can be a chore and something you just won’t do.  That would be a mistake, it’s an important component of social media.  The SMVA can help you find content, suggest ideas for you to blog about, proofread your content, enter it into the chosen blogging platform, format it, find images, and links, categorize and tag it. In short, they do the grunt  work for you and you look like a star!
  • Using available tools, the SMVA can set up a system for tracking how well your social media efforts are doing.
  • Using some automation tools such as SocialOomph, they can automate the posting of your content to many different platforms and even set up schedules for postings in the future.

If you have given up on the idea of using social media for promoting your company or brand because you thought it would consume way too much time, you can find people that actually enjoy doing this kind of stuff and would love to help you move forward.