There are certain aspects of your social media that can be outsourced to a virtual assistant.  So that you free up your time to make the relationships, create the content and follow-up with prospects – along with the rest of your to do list .  Some of the areas that a virtual assistant can help are:

1. The Technical Stuff – social media virtual assistants spend a lot of time online and they are well versed in the tools and technology required to create an online presence.   So the technical side – from creating your accounts, maximizing your profiles, customizing your pages, creating a blog, and connecting everything together – can easily be handled by your virtual assistant.  And, usually much quicker than you could do it anyway!
2. Research – your social media virtual assistant can research keyword and conversations and create a report for you.  As well as, find relevant people for you to follow and connect with.
3. Keeping your accounts updated – your virtual assistant can find relevant articles and information to post on your social media accounts to keep them updated.  Leaving you to do the relationship building and commenting.
4. Re-Purposing Content – One of the best uses of your time is to re-purpose content that you have created and re-use it.  So, for example, your VA could extract some short tips from one of your blog posts to use as status updates.  Or turn a newsletter article into a blog post.  This way you get the most mileage out of every piece of content you create.
5. Tracking your Progress – your virtual assistant can keep track of your analytics.  So, whatever metrics you are using to measure your progress can be tracked and put into a report for you to review.

As you can see, there are many tasks related to social media and internet marketing that can be delegated to your virtual assistant.  It is just a matter of determining what are the vital items that you need to take care of, and then outsourcing the rest.  Leaving you time to focus on the most important tasks – relationship building and following up!

Photo Credit

You will save yourself time in the long run if you strategize in the beginning.  Coming up with a plan will help you narrow your focus and save your precious time. Before you make the leap, consider the following 5 things first:

1. Determine Who You Want to Reach – A vital part of an effective social media plan is understanding who your target market is.  Who are you talking to?  Is it first time homebuyers?  Move Up buyers?  Buyers who are downsizing?  Narrowing down your focus to a specific market will help you fine tune your message and save you time!

2.  What Information is your Market seeking? What are their questions?  What are their problems and concerns?  What information do they need to know and understand before they buy?  By getting to know your target market, you can create content and share information that answers their questions and solves their problems.  This will make your content creation much easier.  As well as providing your clients, customers, and fans with the information they are searching for.

3.  Where do your target customers hang out online? Do some listening and research to find out where your customers are spending their time.  Maybe there are specific forums or niche social networks that cater to your potential customers?  Doing this research ahead of time will allow you to focus solely on the communities that are most beneficial to you.  Since there is never enough time in the day, choosing where you need to spend your time online is an important decision.

4.  What do you want your target customers to do? Think about your sales process.  As you bring more potential clients into the funnel, how do you want to direct them. Should they sign up for an email newsletter?  Should they visit your blog or website? How does social media fit into your current sales process?  You want to focus your social media efforts in such a way that directs your potential customers to take an action.

5.  How are you going to measure success? Once you know who you are trying to reach, where they are hanging out, what you want them to do, you want to be able to measure your results.  So decide on how you will measure your progress.  Maybe it is to track newsletter sign ups or website visits.  Whatever the measuring stick is, you want it to be in place when you start.

By spending some time strategizing up front, you will keep yourself from spinning your wheels in the long run.  So, set aside some time and work on these 5 questions.  You will be happy you did!

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mfinleydesigns/

A Facebook profile is your personal page on Facebook.  If you have been using Facebook already, you have a profile.  To connect with others through your profile, you must friend them and they have to friend you back.

Once you have become friends with someone, you then get their updates, can see their pictures and videos,  and can send messages back and forth.  The same is true of what you post.  Anytime you update your status, comment on another post, upload a picture or RSVP to an event, all of your friends can see it.  You have control over the privacy of your page and how much is shown to those who are not your friends.

Your profile is not meant to be used for business.  When someone becomes your friend, it is ok to mention your business here or there, but your Facebook profile is truly meant to be personal.

Now the business page  is a little different.  Your business page (previously called a fan page) is essentially the storefront for your business on Facebook.  It is a completely public page that can be found via a search engine (such as Google or Yahoo) or through Facebook search.  Anyone can see the information on the page.

Those who want to keep up with your business page will click the “like” button.  This will allow them to see any updates made by your business page.  So anytime you update your status, post pictures or videos, or add an event to your business page, anyone who has liked your page will see that.  It is simple to “like” a page, and you do not need to approve it or friend them back.  They are essentially opting in to receive updates from you through Facebook.  Since they are dealing with the business page, they expect to here news and information related to your business.  So be sure what you are posting is valuable and helpful.

Creating a business page is the best solution for a business presence on Facebook.  It allows you to keep in contact with current customers, as well as future customers.  By simply updating your status or posting a link to an interesting article, you are keeping your business at the top of the mind of your customers.

Social media can be an incredible form of word of mouth advertising.  It is simple and easy for someone to share with their entire network the wonderful experience they had with your business.  Before you start focusing on social media marketing as a way to grow your business, make sure that you are providing exceptional service.  Are you giving extra value?  Are you going above and beyond for your customers?  Because if you aren’t, focus on that first.  Start to brainstorm creative ways to take your service to the next level.  Think of even little things that you can do for your customers that will have them raving about your business.  Then, use social media to spread the message (more importantly, your customers will spread the message for you) quickly.

The businesses that get the best results from social media marketing are the ones that are providing excellent service and therefore have customers who are also fans.  If your business is not there yet, then take some time to work on your customer experience.  Take it to the next level and tackle social media next.  If you already have a huge fan base of customers, then social media marketing is a must for you!

Here is a screenshot of my Twitter page showing the local trends for San Francisco (the closest area to Sacramento).  Twitter also says they are working on adding more locations.

So, lets start with the statistics you can find this information at Facebook Statistics

• Facebook has more than 350 million users
• Users spend an average of over 55 minutes per day on Facebook
• Users have an average of 130 friends
• Users fan an average of 2 pages per month
• Pages have created more than 5.3 billion fans

Plus, Facebook is the #2 visited site in the world behind google.  So, the bottom line is people are on Facebook – so your business should be too!

You probably are already on Facebook personally, and use it to get in touch with old friends, keep up with your family, and share photos.  So how do you use Facebook for business?  Should you use your personal profile?

The answer is no, keep your personal profile personal.  Create a Facebook Fan Page for your business.  Your fan page will have its own URL and is a separate entity from your profile.  You can do all of the same things – like share links, photos, video, write on your wall as your personal profile.  As well as, add events, and allow your fans to RSVP and to upload their own photos and videos from the event.

To get started on setting up a fan page, simple scroll down to the bottom of your Facebook page and click on Advertising.

Clicking on Advertising will take you here:

Click on the Pages Tab :

Then click Create a page and you will land here:

Pay close attention when choosing a Category – scroll through the choices and decide what is the best fit for your business.  When choosing a name also consider adding a little description using your keywords. For example my Facebook fan Page is Called Vintage VA Services – Internet Marketing Virtual Assistant.  Every little bit helps with SEO.

You can also choose to hold off on making you page public, until you get it completely customized.

And now you have created a page for your business.  I will go into more detail on customization in my next post!

The second event was the Sac Tweetup.  This was a chance for Sacramento area Twitter users to meet face to face.  The event was great!  Every person I met was genuinely nice.  The idea of Twitter being a relationship tool, and not a sales tool, was extended to the face to face meet up.  I loved being able to meet in person so many of the people I follow and interact with on Twitter. For someone who is not very comfortable in situations where I don’t know anyone, the fact that I already interacted with many of the people on Twitter, made the experience much easier.

It is well worth it to attend offline networking and learning opportunities.  It just strengthens the relationships you have made online.  As well as allowing you to meet some completely new people!  Search out the tweetups happening in your community – or create one yourself!! Continue building your relationships!

Have you thought about what makes you truly happy?  Are you spending too much time focusing on the parts of your business that you don’t love doing?  Why not delegate the things you don’t love and spend more of your time focusing on what you do!  Maybe you hate maintaining your website.  Well, find someone who enjoys maintaining websites and delegate that task to them.  Now, you have freed up your time!  You can focus on other areas of your business, or spend more time with your family, or whatever makes you happy!

Start thinking about what you really want out of your life and your business and make it happen!  That is truly freedom!