Social Media Virtual Assistant

Other than myself and my staff, we’ve used social media virtual assistants from Upwork, Elance, Odesk, Fiverr to manage social media work. None of them really impressed me. Foreign workers were cheap but always lacked the cultural context of what I or my clients were trying to do. My own staff were good but because of the breadth of our clientele, it was difficult to get any level of expertise on the subject matter. As a co-owner, sure I could do all the social media but I didn’t have the time to dedicate to each client. For a long time we settled on me providing a client brief and my team giving me a first draft for editing. This process worked well.

From an accounting perspective, a freelancer from Upwork is an expense while an employee is a liability but I would rather have a productive liability than an unproductive expense.

For most of our clients, about half of the social media posts were “evergreen,” that is, content that wasn’t time sensitive and could be reused. My business partner and I started thinking about was to automate the content development process using our clients’ websites. Social Media Hammer was born and in about 40 hours of development, we had a prototype that could create a fully complete Hoostsuite bulk upload csv. After another 100 or so hours the system had some intelligence and that brought us to the – this is a tool everyone can use thinking.

If you don’t think automation is for you or you don’t have well written websites that are properly coded then the virtual assistant path might be best for you. Here are some links:

Social Media Virtual Assistant Resources

https://www.taskbullet.com/virtual-assistant-rates/ At these rates I wonder who’s doing the work.

http://www.chrisducker.com/how-to-work-with-a-virtual-assistant-to-manage-your-social-media/ A good set of tips for managing a social media virtual assistant.

https://socialmediafuze.com/8-best-places-get-virtual-assistant-social-media-manager/

https://blog.getmagic.com/2017/06/15/social-media-virtual-assistant/ Very practical tips.