The first step for anybody helping you build your business is a clear understanding of your company’s primary goals and marketing plan.
To effectively understand these two areas, a good Social Media Virtual Assistant will walk you through a process which includes assessment, brainstorming or mind mapping, action planning and evaluation.
The goal of this process is to put together a strategy that focuses on your organizations goals while understanding and utilizing social media and networking practices and technologies.
In order to understand your social media goals, an effective Social Media Virtual Assistant will create an assessment to help identify a starting point and direction for your social media campaign. They will help you clearly understand your motivating factors for participating in social media. For example:
1) Are you interested in building brand visibility and authority? (Thought Leadership)
2) Do you want to increase your influence within a specific community?
3) Is your main goal to promote your products and services?
4) Are you interested in increasing your website or blog traffic?
5) Is your main purpose lead generation?
One of the best ways to accomplish this objective is to walk through a survey of questions about current social media experience and usage. Included in these questions should be questions about:
1) Who is your target audience? Do you have specific goals for your social media engagement?
2) What is currently going well and what is not working? Are you measuring success? If so, how?
3) Do you know the needs and interests of your target audience? Do you know where they are online? What impact should your social media efforts have on your target audience?
4) Are your competitors utilizing social media? If you don’t know, you might need to have an online competitive analysis completed.
5) How much time do you personally want to spend on social media? What role do you want a Social Media Virtual Assistant to perform? For example: Strategy Advisor or Online Presence Coordinator. Have you defined a budget for social media activities?
At the end of this process you should be able to clearly state the defining purpose for your social media campaign.
The
next step is a brainstorming session with your Social Media Virtual Assistant to come up with different ideas to fulfill your goals. I’ve previously utilized a couple of different online mind mapping services in order to share ideas quickly and efficiently. If you are interested in these mind mapping resources, please contact me directly at jodicrosby@smartvaforu.com.
Now that you have your purpose and some great ideas on where you want to go with your social media activities, it’s time to create and put into action your action plan. An action plan should include:
1) Description of your Target Audience
2) A clearly defined Purpose Statement
3) A list of your Measurable and Specific Goals
4) A list of what social media activities you are interested in pursuing
5) A description of what services/training the Social Media Virtual Assistant can provide
6) An Evaluation timeframe
When it comes time for an evaluation of your activities, a Social Media Virtual Assistant should be able to provide you with quantifiable results as well as show you increased levels of engagement and influence.
You are probably wondering if there is a true Return on Investment from Social Media engagement. Here is a video from Erik Qualman (@equalman) of Socialnomics that gives several social media success stories:
Social Media ROI: Socialnomics
Here are some of his best examples:
- Wetpaint/Altimeter discovered companies that widely engage in social media outdo their competition in both revenue and profit.
- Dell has brought in over $3 million in sales via their use of Twitter.
- Gary Vaynerchuk increased the sales from his family business from $4 million to $50 million using social media.
- 24% of social media leads convert to sales opportunities per software company Genius.com.
- Since creating a community for their users, Lenova has experienced a 20% drop in calls to their customer service lines
Here is another great article about the different ways to look at and understand the true ROI of social media engagement.
The Real ROI of Social Media
Let a Social Media Virtual Assistant help you start taking advantage of the Social Media opportunity.
Jodi Crosby, Smart Virtual Assistant for You, is a mom and an entrepreneur committed to working with small business owners. My goal is to enable you to accomplish your goals while leaving the administrative tasks to a professional. I understand that being in business for yourself, while very rewarding is also very challenging. Smart Virtual Assistant for You can help. Visit http://smartvaforu.com. Follow Jodi on Twitter @SmartVAforU
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