Welcome to another episode of the podcast that teaches you how to be a ridiculously good virtual assistant.
Today I want to talk about social media, and how to make your content stand out so you get noticed.
Today’s Quote: Engage, Enlighten, Encourage and especially … just be yourself! Social media is a community effort, everyone is an asset. – Susan Cooper
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Connect with Tracey D’Aviero, VA Coach and Trainer
Episode Notes:
Social media is one of the best tools you can use to promote your Virtual Assistant business.
And yet, many VAs use it incorrectly, and end up seeing little to no results, and/or spending way too much time trying to.
In this episode I want to give you 5 tricks to using social media smarter, so you can showcase your services and get clients to notice you.
Let’s get right to it!
1 – Speak Directly To Your Audience
The biggest mistake I see VAs making in their social media content is not speaking to their audience.
The cool thing about social media is that people see something and think ‘oh, that’s me’, or ‘oh, I need that’ … or, ‘oh, I don’t need that.’
And whatever you like to show interest in, the algorithms of the various social media platforms will show you more of.
Sometimes it’s ads, but more often than not it’s just content.
So if you watch someone’s Tiktok video for a certain length of time, Tiktok will show you more similar content.
If you click on a website link, Facebook will show you a million ads of similar things.
I’ll prove it – if you haven’t seen any posts from one of your FB friends in a while, go and find them in your friends list and then look at some of their most recent posts.
Facebook will almost immediately put them back into your feed – because you showed interest in them. It’s quite uncanny.
The algorithm is the thing. You need people to be interested in what it is that you are posting, no matter which social media platform you are using.
So your messaging is really important.
If you are talking about being a virtual assistant, you will probably not get a lot of engagement from clients who are looking to hire a VA.
But if you are talking about how to use a CRM, or which ecommerce solution to choose, or how to organize your digital files, or how to manage your time and outsource work … guess what?
That’s what your clients are interested in. And that’s what will engage them.
And that’s what the social media platforms will show them more of.
Talk directly to your audience. Don’t skip around the things they are looking to learn about or get help with.
Instead of saying ‘now accepting clients’ or ‘20% off VA rates’, or’ being a VA is great because…’, talk about what you really do.
Who do you help? If you help course creators, say so!
Talk about the things you know about their business, and what they often need help with.
If you don’t catch their attention by talking TO them you are wasting valuable time creating content that no one will respond to.
And that’s the most important thing – your content is supposed to get you noticed, and responded to (or at least interacted with!)
2 – Don’t Be Afraid of Video
The quickest way to build trust with people is face to face. Video content makes it really easy to do that from the comfort of your own home.
You not only get the advantage of doing it quickly, but you can also redo it if you aren’t happy with it. It’s more forgiving than you think.
Now, I’m not advocating for you to spend hours getting thing perfect, but because it’s not always ‘live’ you have the ability to do a second take, (or even edit it), which should alleviate a lot of anxiety around making mistakes while doing it.
Video content can also help showcase what you do and how you help your clients. You will be seen as a credible business person and an authority when you show up and talk about what you know how to do.
To do video well is easy. Just create a list of topics you can talk easily about.
For each topic, come up with 3 things that you can teach or show about that topic.
I did this for years with my FB lives. Three points is sufficient for a video. You can talk very specifically about your topic and you wont’ go on too long.
And if you come up with more than 3 tips, do a second video!
If you do choose to go live, give yourself a break and don’t worry too much about making mistakes.
Prepare an outline to follow for every video and stick to it.
Doing video also helps you to speak about what you do – and you can easily find the clunky language that you might be using in networking or writing. Try it for yourself, you’ll see what I mean.
You can do talking head videos (just you sharing your expertise, insights, information, and so on), screenshares (quick how tos – be careful not to drag these on, they need to be well put together to work for you), conversations with someone else, or even just video footage from an event you are at. There are endless possibilities for video content.
Getting comfortable with video is one of the best things you can do for your VA business. I actually think that Zoom helped our industry a lot with video, since so many people realize now that you don’t have to have a professional studio and do your hair and makeup to be seen on camera.
And yes, you can certainly do faceless videos, but I still advise doing talking head and screenshare ones, at least mostly.
It’s not necessary to do video to be successful, but I would bet you that once you start and you see how easy it is, you will prefer it over many other content types. I sure do!
Getting back to those pesky algorithms, they also really like video. It grabs your audience’s attention and therefore it simply works better on most platforms (though, even Tiktok and IG now give you the opportunity to do other-than-video types of content like images, slideshows and even text, so they must still be valid!
3 – Highlight Your Expertise and Experience
This is a really important trick – talking about your background is essential with and to other business owners is the way to build trust with your audience and potential clients.
Now I can hear you – but Tracey, you said talk about your clients, not about yourself. And yes, that’s true, but if you don’t tell people how you can help them, they won’t understand that you can.
That’s not the same thing as talking about being a VA – which I will still tell you not to do.
Talking about your experiences and your expertise helps them understand why they should work with you.
It will help them understand what your abilities and specialties are.
These are all things that go in to helping them decide whether they want to work with you or not.
Remember – just because you can do this or that for them, doesn’t mean that they will jump to get their wallet out to hire you.
Like any marketing, we need to back up what we say we can do with some kind of proof.
So we need to be creative with how we present that – because always remember that social media is the marketing ‘place’ that works for you – before a discovery call or consult, people can (and will) check you out online.
So sharing things like trainings you have taken, clients you have worked with, tasks you have helped clients with (or done for them), are all really good things to include in your social media content.
Imagine someone scrolling through your Instagram grid and seeing things that make them go ‘wow, that’s what I need’, and ‘wow, she is really good’ when you don’t have to say a word…. that’s the key to having your social media content work for you.
Being able to talk about your expertise is not selling, by the way. It’s about providing info that backs up you saying you can help people with this or that.
Think about it – if you say you help podcasters, and you are able to give real or specific examples of things you have done to help others like posting eye-catching graphics (or samples), showing that you do professional editing, talking about why editing your podcast is important to outsource, and so on, go a long way. Much farther than saying ‘I can help you with your podcast management’.
The more specific your content can be – about things that your clients struggle with or spend too much time doing (or aren’t doing even though they know they should), the better!
4 – Show Behind the Scenes
This is a trick that a lot of people use to increase their engagement. I haven’t done a ton of it yet but I intend to.
Now that doesn’t mean you are suddenly going to see a lot of Get Ready With Me content of me putting on makeup or washing my face (LOL!), but I know it’s important for people to see how things work, and how I do my work.
Showing people behind the scenes is a good way to build trust too. When people see that you are a real person that can help them, it increases their trust in you, quickly.
Yes, behind the scenes is probably better with video, but it doesn’t have to be done that way. Pictures are worth a thousand words, and always have been, right?
So take pictures of yourself working, or attending events, or even pictures of event programs and speakers from events that you are attending (in person or virtual), or with other business people when you are networking or out and about.
A peek behind any curtain is interesting to people – I’m not sure why. But I do know that it’s one of the things I most love about YouTube. When you want to learn how to do something, start there.
There is definitely one (probably many, many) video there to explain exactly what you need to do.
It’s a trusted source of learning, and that’s what your content can be too. You don’t have to publish it on YouTube of course, but you get the idea.
Again, these tricks are good for any social media platform. I’m not going to tell you which social media platform is the right place for you to be networking and talking business on. You can decide that for yourself.
But it’s what you put out there that will reap the rewards for you.
Who you talk to, what you say, how you present yourself, and who sees you and learns about how you help your clients.
Which leads me to my final social media trick:
5 – Network with Strategic Partners
You may have heard me tell you before that not everyone is going to be your client. That’s true, but the cool thing about marketing is that lots of people will see it.
Everyone you meet is an asset to your business. Just like we heard in today’s quote.
They can either become a client, or someone who can refer a client to you.
They are all equally important!
A client is a client, no problem. We all understand that. If you can help them, then you do. And yes, we want to market our business to them. Naturally.
But the other one is someone who could potentially refer a client to you. These are called strategic partners.
Does that mean that everyone you meet will be referring you clients? No but you never really know where your next client will come from.
You could be having a conversation with your mother’s friend and they might know someone who could use your services.
You could be at a networking event and the host tells you they want you to meet someone who could use your services.
One is an official strategic partner, but the other is just as valuable.
When you get used to describing what you do to help your clients to many different audiences, you will expand your network exponentially.
My friend Steve Lowell is a speaking coach and he says:
“It’s not enough for someone to understand what it is you do, they need to be able to repeat it to others.” – Steve Lowell
I quote Steve all the time because he is 100% right. If you can’t easily tell someone who you help and what you help them with in an everyday conversation, you could be leaving clients behind without even knowing it.
Doing this in a conversation is a more forgiving setting – but did you realize that your social media content will be seen by far more people that will never be your clients, you will understand the important of getting it right.
What I mean by that is that more non clients than clients will see your stuff. So why would you not want to put out content that speaks to those non clients?
What does that mean? In the simplest of terms, it means dumb it down.
Not because our strategic partners are dumb, but because by making your content as simple as possible, it’s easy for people to remember and repeat to others.
When I teach VAs messaging, we talk about describing what we do in a variety of ways – for our clients, of course, for potential clients, for our colleagues (VAs and otherwise), and for our strategic partners.
When you are able to describe what you do to each of these different audiences, you will use words that help them understand what you do, in a way so they could potentially repeat it to someone else.
With our clients, you can use words that are relevant to their business, and words that they understand are the tools and resources or processes that you use to work with them.
With potential clients, we might need to change what we say – to describe in a little more detail if they are struggling more because they aren’t getting support right now.
With our colleagues we can use words that are often much better understood because we have some idea of what we do in our businesses. So we don’t have to talk in benefits to our colleagues, but we can talk about tactics or even results.
And finally with our strategic partners, we need to use words that help them describe something they may not know anything about at all to other people. In a professional strategic partner relationship, we actually provide them with literature or marketing material to help.
But hopefully you get the idea of the different ways to describe what you do – and how you can change your content to suit the audience you are trying to reach.
The trick of networking with strategic partners using social media, this can be accomplished by post sharing and connection on our online channels.
Make sure that you are not just trying to connect and reach out to potential clients – because remember that percentage of your ‘audience’ that will become your clients is smaller than the percentage that will not become your client.
It’s worth making a plan to connect with them and build relationships with them too.
There you have it, 5 tricks that can help you sharpen up your social media content so it works harder for you.
Speak directly to your audience – don’t talk about yourself, talk to them about how you help your clients. The simplest change you can make, and I promise you it’s effective.
Don’t fear video – it’s the quickest way to build trust with your potential clients (and also how to simplify your marketing language).
Highlight your experience and expertise. You need to pump your own tires, without being salesy. All that means is to share your experience with helping people, or with learning how to, and focus on that in your content.
Show behind the scenes. Don’t be afraid to let people in so they can see how amazing you are. You don’t have to put your whole life out there, just a bit of your work personality. I’d love to see it (and I promise I’ll share mine too).
And last, network with strategic partners. Always consider the people that might not be your clients and create content that they can repeat to others. It’s your magic trick!
I’m going to leave it here for this week. Take at least one of these tricks and implement it this week. I bet you’ll notice a difference in how you think about marketing.
Do You Need Help?
If you need help help figuring out how to simplify your content, get in touch with me. I’m here to help.
It’s the only reason I’m here at all, as you know. To help you become a ridiculously good VA.
I have helped hundreds of VAs who are stuck get moving through private coaching, group coaching, and live and self study trainings. If you want to talk about how we can work together, let’s connect on a Cut to the Chase call. You can book yours at YourVAMentor.com/chase
Thanks for tuning in this week! I’ll see you next time!
What You Need to Do Next:
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