Office Productivity
Virtual Assistants Tap into Twitter Craze
Published July 28th, 2009 by Jennifer LeClaire
Twitter has emerged as the Web 2.0′s latest phenomenon and Twitter members are growing by the millions. In fact, according to comScore Media Metrix, Twitter got 9.3 million visitors in March, a five million increase from February – and that was before Oprah Winfrey started tweeting.
With so many companies – large and small – turning toward Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites as part of their marketing strategies, virtual assistants are looking to find a niche with entrepreneurs. Catch Friday is one of those services.
Virtual assistant companies figure social media marketing requires one resource you may not have a lot of – time. If you’ve already attempted to keep up with tweets, Facebook updates, LinkedIn groups, MySpace friend requests, event listings and other marketing activities on social media sites, then you’ve undoubtedly determined that it can be a full-time job to stay current.
“Although most social networks offer their services for free, you need to invest a significant amount of time in them to be able to reap the full benefits of using them for customer service and marketing,” says Lawrence Perry of Catch Friday. “Take the case of micro-blogging site Twitter. The network allows its users to share short messages among its members. The messages are updated in real-time so the messages in the feeds change as often as the people post messages on their accounts.”
Without the time to update and maintain a good Twitter site, you will not be able to build a strong community around your brand on Twitter, Perry said. Social media management and content creation can be considered a full-time job with all the things you need to think of and consider when managing social accounts for your business.
Maximizing Social Media
“If you want to maximize the benefits of social media you should consider getting a virtual assistant to focus on the job. With the time and the dedication to make it work, your virtual assistant could do a better job than you in managing Twitter,” Perry says. “If you assign your virtual assistant to focus on developing your Twitter account – following the right people, attracting the right people to follow you and posting valuable content that will help you achieve your goals in using social media.”
The learning curve of Facebook and Twitter alone can be time consumer. That’s why Perry suggests delegating the job to a competent virtual assistant if you are unfamiliar with the social media sites. Virtual assistants are usually tech-savvy because they work with the Internet and other communication tools regularly, but before you hire one be sure to check references. Social media really is an art and if you don’t hire someone with experience it could work against your brand.
“If you and your regular employees are already up to your neck in paper work and other tasks there is no need to take on the social media tasks yourself or even assign the job to your very busy staff,” Perry says. “You just need to hire a virtual assistant who has time to do it and knows how to.”
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Melanie Jones July 29th, 2009 at 1:08 pm
I’m not sure if you can trust a virtual assistant to do your social media updates or not. I mean, if you’ve already been working with that virtual assistant for a while I suppose it’s OK. But to have to train someone about the nuances of your communications strategy isn’t worth it for most companies. This is series business. If they post something wrong, it can really backfire on your company. So it just depends.
Rob Zeus July 29th, 2009 at 1:18 pm
I think you can use a virtual assistant to do the actual posting, but someone in marketing or the owner needs to come up with the general content strategy. Posting on social media sites is time consuming and monitoring them is even more so. A virtual assistant could monitor the posts and alert management if there is anything negative and respond with simple “thank yous” or other answers to simple questions. I can see how it would work.
Bill Brookshire July 31st, 2009 at 5:56 am
I agree that social media is a must. It’s like the Wild Wild Web 2.0 all over again and social networking is at its core. I wouldn’t trust a virtual assistant to do any thoughtful posts, but there is plenty they could do on the simple side. Still, they have to be trained with your corporate culture. Not sure it’s really worth it.