How to build social media campaigns that your VA can implement and monitor

Social Media Campaigns require a lot of groundwork and planning before implementing. There’s a lot of work that goes into launching a social media campaign. More importantly, these campaigns don’t work by the “fire and forget” methodology. They require monitoring, interacting, course correcting, revisits and revisions to be successful. 

Planning, organizing, scheduling and executing the steps involved in a social media campaign can take a great deal of time and resource. Business owners can get overwhelmed with this process and this can affect the other business needs that require attention. This is where a virtual assistant can come in handy.

A virtual assistant is not be mistaken for a social media manager. A social media manager would have a skillset specialized in the domain of social media and digital marketing. A virtual assistant would on the other hand is a generalist with a wider scope along the avenues of process implementation.

So, when running a campaign, even if a virtual assistant cannot be deployed for the actual skirmish, he can be used to man the artillery and carry out follow up instructions on the fly. A virtual assistant can follow instructions but cannot strategize along the way. You will own the strategy for the campaign. The virtual assistant will ensure the execution of the strategy. In other words, a virtual assistant would be responsible for the implementation of the strategy.

If you’ve got a social media campaign in mind and lack the time and resource to see it through. Don’t worry! You’ve got options. You could use a virtual assistant to carry out your strategy for you. And if you’ve already got a strategy in place, then let’s talk. (CTA for Virtual assistance call)

However, in the interest of giving you clarity into making the most of a virtual assistant for a social media campaign, we’ve put together a few pointers that will help you down this road.

Clear and concise blueprint of the strategy:

A virtual assistant is an implementer and not a social media manager. So, it would be highly essential to give the virtual assistant all the details about the strategy involved. And it must be noted here that social media campaign is just a segment of the overarching digital marketing strategy. So, a deeper insight into the entire strategy will help the virtual assistant connect the dots and tie things together with the principal strategy.

This happens to be one of the key areas where business owners fail. A Strategy needs to have a tangible line of action items with an appropriate measure of success. The measure of success will prove critical when it comes to recalibration and re-runs.  

Having full-blown documentation of the strategy will help the virtual assistant in better implementing the strategy.

Lucid Guidelines for the virtual assistant:

Before delegating the implementation over to a virtual assistant, it would be useful to lay down a checklist of the goals. For this exercise to organically mutate into the process, it would be essential to have few things clearly defined: 

• The role of the virtual assistant.
• The scope of the virtual assistant.
• Necessary procedures and protocols to be followed by the virtual assistant.
• Why and when to escalate issues.
• The access level granted to the virtual assistant.
• Providing the virtual assistant insights into context and messaging.
• Orienting the virtual assistant in line with your strategy and thought process.

If these things are achieved, things are likely to take off sooner than you expect.

Now that you’ve laid the ground rules and set the ball in motion, let us see as to what can be expected out of your virtual assistant in this arena.

• Monitoring Social Media Campaigns:Once the campaign has been fired out, you could leash out the controls to the virtual assistant. With a clear understanding of the underlying strategy and the overarching messaging the virtual assistant would be able to carry out several tasks. Setting up ad campaigns, tracking and reporting the reports involved and to an extent helping with social media ideas. Another aspect with which virtual assistants can help would be monitoring and responding to public comments. Some of these comments may require response while others may need immediate removal.
• Engaging with the audience: The purpose of a social media campaign is to spur engagement and reach the target audience. If the virtual assistant is trained along these aspects, a great deal of the response time can be reduced. However, for this to take effect, the virtual assistant would have to have a clear understanding of your messaging. This can be facilitated with proper guidelines. Engaging with followers can create a sense of trust amidst the audience. On the other hand, an unattended negative comment can snowball into something devastating; a virtual assistant can prevent that from happening.
• Creating a researched content template: Clear set of guidelines  content plan template will go a long way in helping the virtual assistant. A template citing details about the number of posts in a week, the type of content and the channels to be utilized can help forecast the campaign. With a comprehensive set of guidelines, the virtual assistant can draft content, source appropriate images and run it by for approval (which can be optional) before posting them. 
• Managing network: This is by far one of the most critical elements upon which the success of a campaign heavily rests. Assuming that you have well targeted, engaging content pieces in your line of fire, but irrelevant contacts in your network, the entire campaign would lay waste. Managing the network is a critical aspect of social media campaigns. A virtual assistant can help in this aspect by weeding out irrelevant contacts and nurturing an appropriate audience. There are certain tools out there, that can help virtual assistants carry out this role effectively. Virtual assistants can also research across various platforms and build a healthy following for better outreach.

Gunning for a virtual assistant to take over your overwhelming social media campaign?

Look no further!

With experience spanning over a decade, Velan has a team of virtual assistants with expertise cutting across the spectrum of digital marketing. Creative content writers, strategic digital marketers and sharp data analysts, together the magic of delivering not just results but also values.