Following on from the last blog in the ‘How Virtual Assistants can Help Small Businesses’ series, we are going to look at ideas for outsourcing your social media online. If you missed the last blog, ‘Ideas for Outsourcing your Blog Maintenance Online’, you can catch up with it here.
Social media as a tool is relatively new to the business world, and eventually, business people started to recognise it as an opportunity to spread the word about their products and services.
When social media is used thoughtfully and carefully it can make a considerable difference in the way that people perceive your business. However, there are plenty of small businesses that do not understand how to approach the subject. Trying to decide on which platform to use to best serve your business can be a problem in itself. This confusion can then cause a delay in starting to use social media and quite possibly nothing will get done and the opportunity goes to waste.
To get the best from social media you must post content and engage with your followers regularly and on a consistent basis. This can be very time consuming and the perfect solution could be to outsource your social media to a virtual assistant.
Social Bookmarking
Essentially social bookmarking is using the power of crowdsourcing. The more people that talk about a particular subject the more focus and credibility is given to that topic. On the web, a great way of spreading the word is by ‘bookmarking’. This is when other people essentially vote for the topic in question within a variety of networks, such as Digg. The virtual assistant will write a compact description of a particular product, solution or service that you would like to publicise. This compact story will then be distributed through various networks by a variety of people and this serves to provide links and awareness.
Facebook seems to be at the centre of anything to do with social media and has become an essential part of many people’s lives, with many people visiting Facebook several times a day. A business can – and should – have a dedicated Facebook page. Your virtual assistant can create one for you and brand it to line up with your website. However, unlike your website, on Facebook you can interact with friends, new prospects and gain exponential exposure by proactively working to establish your business as the expert in your field.
Twitter is essentially a micro-blogging platform. Here again, your virtual assistant can set up your Twitter account with your branding, and they will work to engage with people who are also interested in the area within which you operate by constantly keeping in touch with relevant news, information, updates and advice. Businesses that use Twitter can be at the forefront of the social media scene.
How Social Media can Help Bloggers
These three solutions represent just the beginning of the story when it comes to social media and business opportunities, and social media is also great to spread the news about a new blog you have published, or to bring people’s attention to previously published material. You could take a picture from a blog, add a snippet and share to the various social media platforms with a call to action pointing to the blog you want to send your follower to. You can use a different image and snippet for various days of the week, which in turn will increase your reach back to the original blog.
It would be great to hear how social media has helped your business or helped increase traffic to your blog. So if you would like to share please leave your comments below.
Next time we shall look at Ideas for Outsourcing Your Daily Schedule Online.
See you soon
Emma x
If you would like to chat and discuss further how a VA can help support you with your blog or your business contact me or drop me a message over on my Facebook page, it would be great to hear from you.
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Blogs in the “How Virtual Assistants can Help Small Businesses” series…
Ideas for Outsourcing Your Blog Maintenance Online
Ideas for Outsourcing Your Daily Schedule Online
Ideas for Outsourcing Your Design Projects Online
Ideas for Outsourcing Your Web Development Online
Ideas for Outsourcing Your Multimedia Projects Online
Ideas for Outsourcing Your Financial Record Keeping Online
Ideas for Outsourcing Your Content Creation Online
Ideas for Outsourcing Your Project Management Online
Ideas for Outsourcing Your Administration Online
