In this article I will explain how I streamlined the social media publishing with the help of the web based application Hootsuite and team of Virtual Assistants.
Handling multiple social media accounts can be daunting, time wasting and can create insane amount of friction, not to mention the level of distractions. Avoiding these distractions is one of the critical factors when it comes down to running your web based business. And the secret to running multiple websites, without loosing sanity is HootSuite, with a smart VA team.
I am writing this article for digital entrepreneurs with strong social media presence and social media managers, who are looking for assistance with their social media efforts. As person of the web I am running multiple websites, and if it wasn’t for Hootsuite and my VA’s, I would go crazy, literally.
Prerequisites for this tutorial
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- You need to have a virtual assistant or VA team
- You need to have Hootsuite pro
Benefits of Hootsuite pro
Team members
First of all, as a paying member you can have a team of 2, and one of those two is you. My second team member is the account that my VA’s created, and I gave them access to my social networks.
Not giving passwords to my VA’s is not a matter of confidence, rather a matter of convenience. Later on I can add the new social media accounts to the team, without them having to think about getting the new id, saving it, etc, etc… Streamlines productivity, in a big way. It leaves granular control over the access
This way, my VA’s can take care of the social media maintenance, like thanking people for retweets, greeting new followers, and similar things, that would take too much of your time, but are easily done by somebody else.
Other benefits:
- Social Media analytics
- Infinite number of accounts
- Unlimited RSS feeds (to import into any social network)
- Vanity URL’s (costs extra)
Benefits of Virtual Assistants running your social media
My VA’s schedule tweets in advance, by a simple rule that they received in the instructions. This way I ensured that I don’t have to invest time in low productivity tasks, where I would waste too much time, because of distracting nature of social networks.
Give it to the VA’s, and you will be present, without your immediate presence. I have to add, that I still manage the large portion of my social media manually, and I make sure my VA’s contact me, if something unusual happens.
How my social networks get updated while I sleep?
In order to automate as much as possible, my VA team got recurring tasks on daily basis. There are two tasks that my VA’s get on daily:
Thanking for Retweets
As a member of Triberr, blogging social network, I acquire insane amount of retweets from the people who share memberships in the Tribes. Personally thanking each and every one of them is tedious and complicated process, but I don’t want to be unpolite.
Imagine if you had a team support for answering the simple customer service related question. Once you hit the certain size, certain questions start repeating itself, over and over again. Having someone who will answer these questions manually instead of you, based on pre-created templates, is indeed a life saver.
You get to be polite, perceived as a business that cares, but you don’t waste time on the tasks, that you absolutely have no need to participate in!
Schedule Tweets
As Alpha Efficiency is currently content driven business, it needs to consistently and constantly be present in the social networks, allowing engagement to happen. At this rate, I am leaving VA’s to repost my old posts, and have them monitor the performance of the previous updates.
The other part of scheduling tweets is conducted by me, and usually it’s curating the content of the other people. For this instance I use auto schedule feature in Hootsuite, so my updates don’t get posted at the same time as the updates that are scheduled by my VA’s.
Conclusion
Hootsuite and Virtual Assistants play well together. The dashboard allows you the complete control of what get shared, analytics helps you track the best times of the day to post, and reactions are gathered in real time.
As your following grows, and numbers as well, you will start noticing patterns, that will allow you to make strategic decisions about your updates. This kind of insight is enterprise level, that you get for 10$ a month.
If you consider yourself social media professional, not having absolutely best social media support is leaving you without this unfair advantage.
Put this post into action:
- Apply for Hootsuite account, up for 5 accounts it’s free
- Check out the review of Efficise.com Virtual Assistant company or start outsourcing right away.
- Make recurring tasks for your VA’s to act upon, daily.
- Use free time to think about the future status updates, content creation, or any other business related stuff.
- Leave a comment with your thoughts about this process, and wether you found it helpful.
