Social Media Today Group News | LinkedIn

Social Media Today Group News | LinkedIn.

Top 5 common social media mistakes.

What the heck does a VA actually do for you?

A social media virtual assistant can really help take the load off a business owner by handling the grunt work of posting and handling message traffic and that is a great service by itself. But is that all they should do? Should they be just another marketing expense?

A good one will do all that and more. They can actually be a profit center for your business by helping to build branding and providing customer support to your existing customers. A good SMVA should be able to really get into your business mindset and understand the goals and philosophy of your company. They should have a “marketing mindset” that helps move your business forward. If they are treated as “doers” rather that both “thinkers & doers”, you will not get the best that a good one can offer. Allow them the freedom to create for you, it’s their job. The old saw “I don’t pay you to think” and “just do what you are told to do” is dumb and restrictive.

If you just grabbed some warm body from the advertising department or your ad agency and said “you are now the Social Media person”, you have made a big mistake in most cases. You may get lucky and find someone that can really take the bull by the horns and run with it but that is not very likely. If you micro-manage them to death you are wasting both your time and theirs.

Open up and let them know what you expect from a social media program. If they are any good, they will tell you if your expectations are realistic or pipe dreams. They might even be able to surprise you with methods and concepts that had never occurred to you that can garner huge results. It could happen!

Every day, I find new tools that I can employ to help my clients. To do so requires that I have my finger on the pulse of the Web and be able to look over the horizon to see the trends and new connections that are possible and be able to decide if this is the right tool for this situation. Not all are useful, depending upon the desired result or particular program I am running for them.

Here is a little anecdote from a friend I have learned a lot from. It illustrates the sometimes obscure trail in linked social media that can lead to customers and sales.

She was checking her Twitter feed one day and caught a tweet that linked to mention in a blog post about some beautiful artwork the blogger had seen. She followed the link in the blog to a YouTube video about an artist and his work. She loved the pictures she saw and followed the YouTube link to his website where he was offering a course in painting and a companion book. She proceeded to buy the book and to pass the word on to her circle of friends and added it to her Twitter stream as well. This resulted in even more traffic to his website and likely more sales for him. Sweet – social media at work!

This is how it works. It is not our father’s way of doing business. It IS the way that works today. Old school methods are not very effective any more. All the major players are using Twitter, Facebook Fan Pages, MySpace, Blogging and other non-traditional forms of promotion to engage their audience and building a huge following because of it. You should be looking at rethinking your advertising program and considering at least adding a social media component. Also consider adding a SMVA to the mix to make it happen. You might be surprised!

Too busy to get started in Social Media?

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.

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