Did you know there are over 1 billion Instagram users worldwide, according to eMarketer, 2020 and 444 million users on Pinterest, according to statista, 2021? Yes, that was billion with a “b” for Instagram. And with all those numbers, it’s no wonder having a social media presence is vital to promote a brand or business. However, creating a consistent social media strategy can be time consuming and overwhelming, especially for small businesses. That’s why many businesses find that hiring a virtual assistant is beneficial to help them with tasks like social media marketing. So today, I’m sharing how to become a social media personal assistant.

If you want to learn more about other virtual assistant jobs besides a social media assistant, then you’ll love this post HERE.

How to Become a Social Media Personal Assistant

Social Media Manager Job Description

A social media manager is someone who oversees one or more social media accounts for a business or brand. Some businesses hire full-time employees to work in-house as a social media manager, while other businesses opt to hire virtual social media managers. Virtual social media managers work remotely from anywhere.

Hiring a virtual social media manager is a great option for small businesses who may not have a budget to hire a social media manager who works in-house. You only pay for the services you agree upon and don’t have to pay for extra incentives like health insurance or 401k plans.

On the flip side, it’s beneficial for the virtual social media assistant because they can set their pricing, make their own hours, work from anywhere and be their own boss.

Because social media is such a widely used marketing tool, it’s important for small and large businesses alike to have a consistent and creative online presence. But many times, small businesses don’t want to be spending time trying to create a social strategy when there’s 100 other things to do to run a successful business.

Here are some of the responsibilities and duties of a social media personal assistant:

• Create content – design or photography concepts
• Write social posts in the voice of the brand/business
• Schedule social posts
• Create graphics for the social posts
• Plan out the content calendar
• Analyze engagement and data regarding posts
• Engage with community

Social Media Management Services

Depending on your level of expertise, here are services a social media manager might offer.

Copywriting

As a social media personal assistant, you’ll write many social posts. Your job as the writer is to understand each business or person’s voice you’re managing a social account for. Do your research and look at previous posts they’ve written or YouTube videos they’ve filmed. Are they witty and charismatic or more mellow with a sweet disposition? Make sure their personality comes out in your writing.

Schedule Posts

Thanks to many different social media tools, you can schedule and batch posts instead of posting in real-time every day. I listed out some of the best tools to use to schedule social posts later on. But it saves you so much time and energy batching posts and scheduling a week, two weeks or a month out. Consistency is key in the social media world and scheduling posts helps you do just that for your clients.

Run Ads on Social Media

Besides creating content for a client, another marketing tactic used on social media is purchasing ads. You should be familiar with how to purchase ads on a variety of platforms, and what’s the best option for each client.

Engage with Followers

If you’ve done any research about algorithms on any platform, you know that engaging with your audience is key to getting on the algorithm’s good side. But many businesses don’t have the time to respond to comments, direct messages (DM) or engage with other accounts. That’s one of the many reasons why a social media manager is so helpful because they can do the engaging on your behalf. By responding to your comments and DMs, this encourages your followers to continue to engage with you in the future.

Create Graphics

As a social media manager, you need to be familiar with creating graphics. Whether it’s for Instagram stories, Pinterest pins or cover art for IGTV, it’s important to know your way around a design tool like Canva. Ideally, you want to use the same fonts and/or colors for a brand’s artwork. That way, you build brand recognition for that business.

Create a Content Calendar

A content calendar helps you stay organized and consistent with what you’re going to post for your client. You might find that some clients like to come up with concepts themselves or they may want you to come up with content concepts. Content calendars are included in most of the tools I listed below. But you can also find some with a simple Google search too. You can create a content calendar for a week a time or a month a time. Whatever works best for you and your client.

Analyze Data Reports

A hired virtual assistant should also be able to analyze data reports from social media channels. The reason this is so important is because clients want to see results, and the results are in the data. It’s a good practice to pull data reports at the end of each month to show your client their growth, impressions, engagement and clicks to their site. And ideally, it’s continuously going up because of your expert help.

Average Salary for Social Media Managers

The average salary for a social media manager depends on your level of expertise and what type of work you’re doing for each client. Many social media managers price their services by packages. Say package one has:

• Create a monthly content calendar
• Post 3 Instagram and Facebook posts per week
• Engage with audience for 20 minutes after each post
• Respond to 20 DMs daily

With that package, you would determine about how long that would take you to do and multiple those hours by your hourly rate. Most social media managers charge anywhere from $15 to $50 per hour.

Best Social Media Management Tools

Planoly

The Virtual Assistant Studio uses Planoly to schedule our Instagram posts and stories. The app and desktop program allows you to drag and rearrange your photos in your feed to get the desired layout you want. It’s user-friendly and can curate content for multiple social media accounts. They have a free version, if you want to poke around and see some of the features the tool offers.

Tailwind

Tailwind is a program used to schedule Pinterest and Instagram. At the Virtual Assistant Studio, we love batching our clients’ Pinterest posts a week, two weeks or even a month at a time. The best part is Tailwind has a smart-schedule feature that suggests post times when your audience is most active. That way, you’re getting the most engagement possible with every post. Tailwind is a verified Pinterest partner. Therefore, Tailwind has a pulse on new trends and best practices for using Pinterest.

HootSuite

HootSuite is a social media management tool that integrates with Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube. You can schedule posts across multiple social media platforms, monitor interactions and manage analytics. If you’re managing multiple accounts, you can engage directly from Hootsuite. That way, you’re not constantly toggling back and forth between accounts. It also has a team collaboration feature that is helpful for larger teams. This feature shows you a bird’s eye view of private message and queries coming in from multiple accounts. These messages can be assigned to different team members, so no message goes unanswered.

Later

Later is a social media marketing platform compatible for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn and TikTok. This tool has a Linkin.bio feature. When the link is clicked in your Instagram bio, it drops down multiple clickable boxes to drive traffic to your most important content and/or websites. Later is a verified partner of Pinterest and Instagram too.

Facebook Creator Studio

Facebook Creator Studio is a tool to help a social media manager plan, schedule and analyze Instagram and Facebook accounts. Anyone with access to a Facebook page can use Facebook Creator Studio. It’s a free tool to use to schedule social media posts, analyze activity and manage multiple accounts. However, not all tools are available to everyone with access to a page. Only the administrator of each page has full access to all the capabilities of Facebook Creator Studio.

Tips on How to Become a Social Media Personal Assistant

Become Familiar with Social Media Marketing Platforms

It’s probably not feasible to know the ins and outs of every social media marketing platform out there. Because there are a lot! But it is important to know your way around a program or two that covers all the major platforms. For example, you may want to get super familiar with Tailwind and Planoly to cover the basics of Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram. Or maybe you just become familiar with Facebook Creator Studio to manage Instagram and Facebook. Depending on what type of social media va you want to be, will then determine which programs you need to learn.

Social media assistants should also have basic knowledge of creating graphics for social platforms. Many of the above tools I mentioned earlier have built-in graphic creators. More like a plug and play. We use Canva the most for creating on-brand graphics for our clients.

Skill Sets to Hone

As a social media virtual assistant, you need to be organized, especially if you’re going to juggle multiple clients. If you’re not a naturally organized person, then utilizing a project management system might be a good option for you. We use ClickUp to manage each task for every client of ours.

Besides the project management system, another tip to stay organized is to focus on one task at a time. So if that means turning your phone on silent and snoozing all other dings that might go off, then do it! You’ll be more productive and focused to complete each task you have to finish.

Another way to stay organized is to utilize Google calendar. We wrote a blog post on all the ways we use this tool to keep stay organized HERE.

Another important skill to have is to be a good communicator with your clients and other team members. As a team, we use the program Slack to communicate between each other. That way, we’re not texting, emailing and writing notes in our management system. Everything regarding communication is done through Slack, so we can track what was said and when. It also gives us more of a work-life balance because you can snooze notifications on the weekends or after hours. But still have the option to check in whenever you want.

Where to Look for Social Media Management Jobs

Facebook groups: Facebook groups are one of the easiest places to find clients and freelance positions of any sort. You just have to find the right ones to fit your niche. For example, if you’re wanting to be a social media manager for bloggers and influencers, then joining groups related to that niche would make sense. After joining those groups, be active by answering questions asked in the group and being an engaged member. When members of the group start noticinging you knowing your stuff, they’ll naturally start asking you questions, which then may lead into a freelance gig with them.

LinkedIn: The next place to find freelance positions is on LinkedIn. It’s important to have your profile up-to-date, using searchable words in your title and description. For example, if you’re searching for a social media manager position, then you’ll want to include that in your title. In the description, you can use other position names related to that like social media virtual assistant, social media freelancer or virtual assistant services. You never know who will be searching that platform and discover your profile from all the keyword-rich terms you used.

Freelance websites: There are websites that are dedicated to freelance positions like Fiverr and Upwork. They have anything from one-off jobs to more permanent positions.

Content marketing: Businesses want to hire experts in their field. A great way to showcase your abilities and talents is to create a blog related to your expertise. You can write about topics related to your field. This not only shows off your abilities and knowledge of your industry, but also creates more searchable content for your business.

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