Episode 53: What Does a Social Media Manager Do for Their Clients? – Freelance/Virtual Assistant Service Series

Full Episode Transcription:

(00:07):
Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Ditch the Classroom podcast. Super excited to have y’all back with me. And if you’re new here, thanks for joining us! Before we jump into today’s content. I just wanna real quickly invite y’all to take that next step in your Ditch the Classroom journey. So if you are very new to virtual assistance, don’t even really understand what it is. Then I wanna invite you to check out my free virtual assistant workshop. This is where I’m really gonna break down what a VA does, what services they can offer, how much they can paid, where to even find clients to help you replace your income and all of that. If you’re interested in that, I’ll have to link in the show notes. If you already know about virtual assistance and you are just ready to take that next step and figure out what services are right for you, and kind of get that packaged and ready to go, my Ditch the Classroom Toolkit is for you. This is really the foundational steps to becoming a virtual assistant. It’ll help you determine what services would light you up, what prices you should be charging on those packages, and really putting those together in a beautiful format to send to potential clients. Now, if you are ready to go all in on this freelancing virtual assistant journey, you’re ready to ditch the classroom completely, replace your teaching income and have all of the tools that you need to do so, then the Teacher Turned Freelancer Academy is for you. This is the program where you will get ongoing support. You will get feedback on anything you’re working on. There are 10 different modules in this program and in each module are bite-size video lessons that will help you implement the different tools and techniques and strategies that I teach you so that you can start your virtual assistant business even faster and take it from zero to 60 as fast as you can. This really is the complete program that you need to become a virtual assistant. So if this interests you again, the link will be in the show notes for all three of these, go check it out, see what’s the right fit for you on your Ditch the Classroom journey.

(03:16):
All right. So on this episode, we’re gonna be continuing our freelance and virtual assistance services series. This series is just to give you an overview of popular services that you can offer as a virtual assistant and what those services entail. So back on episode 47, we talked about Pinterest Management. Episode 49, I taught you about Email Marketing Strategists. Episode 51 was Podcast Management. And today we’re focusing on social media management. So in a world that’s dominated by social media, businesses need to have an online presence. If they want to grow long-term, they also probably don’t have the time to manage this all themselves. So this is where a social media manager comes in. Social media managers can create the written content, so like the captions, graphics, videos. They can do hashtag research, engage with ideal clients, and create content plans for a business’ social media.

(04:29):
You can specialize in any platform you’d like, so you could specialize in Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, etc. A lot of people will do Facebook and Instagram together or just LinkedIn. You could do Instagram and TikTok together. Or just TikTok. It’s really whatever preference you have. But typically you just focus on one to two that you specialize in. So generally, a social media manager will start out by creating a content strategy for what should be posted throughout the month. And when you do this, you’ll usually have a meeting before you create the strategy to get feedback from your client about what promotions they have coming up, what types of posts they’d like to see and things like that so that you have a good idea of what’s going on in their business before you even create that content strategy, ’cause you wanna make sure you’re marketing and speaking to those promotions that they have going on.

(05:30):
So you’ll create a content strategy and then usually send that off to your client to get approval. Then as far as creating the actual content, this is where you you’ll create like the captions. So, let me real quick breakdown a really good caption for you, ’causeI know sometimes you’ll see just like two sentence captions, but other times you’ll see, you know, pretty long, meaty captions. The importance of having a really good caption in a business is crucial because you want to capture that potential client’s attention. So starting the caption with a hook, something that’s gonna – one sentence, or just couple words -that’s gonna make them want to click read more on that post. Okay. So you’ll start with the hook and then you’ll have the actual content of the post. So what are they wanting to teach in the post? What do they want the client to know? And then at the end you’re gonna have a CTA or a Call to Action. So what do you want that potential client to do next? Do you want them to click the link in your bio? Do you want them to send you a message and answer a question? Do you want them to comment? What do you want them to do next?

(06:44):
Okay. So a lot of times you might also need to be creating custom graphics for your client’s social media. So one tool I recommend for that is Canva, C-A-N-V-A. It’s a free tool that you can use to create all the graphics that you need. They have different elements in there that you can plug and play. It’s really an amazing tool. I’ve talked about Canva in-depth before. Seriously, go check it out. It’s amazing. You can also source stock photos for them. So if they don’t provide photos to you, you can find ones that will kind of match their brand at different copyright-free image websites. Two that I recommend are Pixabay, P-I-X-A-B-A-Y .com and Unsplash.com, U-N-S-P-L-A-S-H.com. So you can use those, if you, if your client’s not providing you very many images, but you could also have them provide you images. You know, for example, if they’re a client who maybe makes gourmet food, they need to be sending you pictures of their gourmet to show off. So you wanna make sure that you kind of have a mixture of both. You can use stock photos, but I do recommend having your clients try to get you photos and videos that you can use for the marketing purposes as well.

(08:14):
Social media managers also do hashtag research. So you wanna make sure you’re using hashtags that are relevant to the post, but also hashtags that people are gonna be actually searching. So you wanna think about, “what is my client’s ideal client searching?” And you wanna use those hashtags. And then you can also engage with potential customers by going into those hashtags and commenting on different posts that have used that hashtag. I hope that makes sense.

(08:45):
Then also a social media manager will schedule the content ahead of time. So as a social media manager, you don’t want to be having to go on at a certain day, a certain time and getting the post up. So scheduling the content ahead of time, getting a whole month’s worth of content done in like two hours scheduled out is ideal. There are literally so many options for scheduling. You can little bit of research to find what’s gonna work best for you. But my two favorites are Planoly, P-L-A-N-O-L-Y, and Facebook Creator Studio. So I love Planoly because it’s mostly for Instagram. You can really see what your feed is gonna look like. So if your client has a specific pattern on their feed, you can really lay that out nicely in Planoly and see it visually how it’s gonna look altogether.

(09:44):
The only thing with Planoly is you have to pay to do more than 30 images a month, which typically people aren’t gonna need. But you also have to pay if you wanna do videos automatically scheduled, which I do a lot of videos myself. So I’ll lay everything out in Planoly, but then I actually schedule everything in Facebook Creator Studio. So Facebook Creator Studio is free and you can sync it to the Facebook page and Instagram. And you can sync all of your client’s Facebook pages and Instagram to your Facebook Creator Studio so you don’t have to be logging back and forth into different client’s pages. It’ll all be in one hub. So highly recommend Facebook Creator Studio. The only problem with them is sometimes when it actually pushes the post through to Instagram, it will kind of mess up the formatting once in a while. So you do just wanna kind of go in a couple minutes after the post is scheduled to go up and just make sure everything looks okay. And if not, you’ll just edit and fix it.

(10:49):
So that’s kind of really the overview of social media management. If you have any questions about any of the stuff that I talked about today, always feel free to message me on Instagram. But if you love social media, you like graphic design, being creative, writing, then social media management might be a great fit for you. Also make sure to stay tuned in for the next episode in this series where I’m gonna be teaching you all about the world of online business management. All right y’all, I hope you have a great rest of your week and I will see you next time.