Virtual assistants have a variety of tasks under their belt. Think of them as your business’s new and improved administrative secretaries: they research online, manage emails, update Social Media pages and most importantly, work on generating leads—the only difference is they work online and in front of a computer screen. Most successful businesses have VAs behind the scenes, doing the necessary workload and keeping everything afloat through careful instructions given to them. They do this by taking away the mundane tasks from your hands and letting you focus on more important, pressing matters. Not only does this boost your productivity, it also improves your business overall. With this in mind, it’s no wonder everybody’s hiring virtual assistants! 

Now, social media has become one of the niftiest ways to generate leads online. It is said that almost 55% of internet users are using the World Wide Web for several reasons such as entertainment, education, commerce and so on. Considering this, most businesses upgrade their social media outlets to make it more accessible and attractive to potential customers and clients. They do this through a number of strategies, such as running contests, sharing links, publishing blogs, and even hosting hangouts. You probably know all of this since social media nowadays has become the quickest way to garner leads. What you probably don’t know is how our virtual assistants fit into this type of marketing strategy. 

Virtual assistants can be a part of your workforce, even when they aren’t necessarily full time and work on an hourly rate. If you’re a small business owner with a limited number of employees under your wing, then you would agree with the notion of your employees working on core functions directly under their jurisdiction. It’s the same with big companies—they’ll be too busy handling their own existing pool of clients to work on new campaigns.

Generating leads through social media takes time, time you could be spending working on important tasks to improve the quality of your business. Now, if you’re facing the same problems, this is where our solutions come in: 

• Don’t have the time to update your social media outlets? Hire a virtual assistant. 
• Don’t have the time to wait for a response from a potential client? Hire a virtual assistant. 
• Don’t have the time to work with each promising lead you garner? Hire a virtual assistant.

Think of them as an extension to your hands: You’ll get more effective work done this way. Just delegate important tasks, provide a clear-cut profile for the prospects, and identify goals and tasks that must be accomplished at a given time—the virtual assistant will do the rest. By the end of the day, not only will your work be complete but also you will have garnered a number of relevant leads crucial for your business. If you think your VA can’t handle it—trust me, they can, provided you make sure the given instructions are clear and concise. 

Still not convinced? Here is the complete guide to social media lead generation for virtual assistants and how they can assist in optimizing your business:  

1. Social media advertisements 

Photo by Will Francis on Unsplash

One of the most effective ways to garner leads is through social media advertisements. Companies have turned to the virtual world to market their value to potential clients and interested customers. A Facebook page is useless if you don’t constantly update it with what you can offer to people and how they can avail to said offers. However, advertising your products and services through social media platforms takes time and effort, especially when you have to respond to queries and comments on those said posts. Let’s admit it—this is time-consuming work. 

While the importance of nurturing the leads found in those posts cannot be stressed enough, most small businesses have difficulty keeping up with updating their posts to keep the client pool interested. Now, this is a concern that can easily be solved with a virtual assistant, a person whose job is to assist you. 

The VA’s task in this particular field is to keep the leads on the advertisements posts interested and to strike a connection. This can be done through a multitude of options, such as utilizing Facebook promotion strategies or using Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn’s lead generations ads feature. 

Let’s talk about promotion strategies in Facebook where you have three ways of generating leads. 

a. On-page promotion

Facebook allows you to create your own page where it makes it easier for interested customers to reach out to you. They can do this through posting on your wall, commenting on your posts and even directly messaging you. Now, the key here is to immediately respond to their queries to make sure they won’t lose interest. However, keeping track of these interactions can throw off a schedule or a job you’re planning to do, unless you have a virtual assistant handling these tasks. 

b. Off-page promotion

A different method of promoting your business can be accomplished through Facebook communities, groups, and other pages. This keeps it easy for people to strike a conversation towards businesses that share the same services, which makes it a great area to scout for potential leads as well. Furthermore, this method increases the reach a business has on their customer pool, as the customers are given the avenue to express their concerns and queries. Once again, this is time-consuming and demands constant updates, which is why a virtual assistant would be preferred in this scenario. 

c. Paid promotion

This is an instant method that allows you to see quick results ASAP. Facebook has different types of lead ad types when you want to turn to paid promotion. When clicking on Lead Generation, Facebook will ask you to provide forms and gated content links. Examples are ebooks, demos, trials and checklists. The leads you generate from this method will need to be verified. A virtual assistant can do these tasks for you. 

Twitter and LinkedIn have similar options when you sign up for their website. 

Other than Facebook promotions, these three platforms also have lead generation ads, which help businesses collect direct leads right on the site. This process takes at least 30 seconds of one’s time.

2. Online contests 

Another way to generate leads is through online contests. Everybody loves freebies and the best way to get noticed is to post a contest with a well-valued price on hand. Depending on the steps to take in order to join the contests, users help to comment and share the post for the rest of their friends to see while also providing valuable information. What happens using this method is that you’re advertising your product to more people with each person you reach. You now have a pool of potential leads available at your disposition. Since the easy part is finished, contacting those leads will be another time-consuming task.

Virtual assistants help to keep things in order during online contests such as these. They do so by updating the page in regards to the prize. However, it needs to be remembered when you run contests, the value of the prize should be something related to the product and/or services you provide. This maximizes the probability of turning participants into promising leads. 

Filtering leads can be done through lead nurturing, which is a task you can delegate to your virtual assistant.

3. Shared gated links  

Gated links are valuable content that needs to be accessed by handing out basic contact information. Many sites and businesses use this method to ensure the leads they generate are highly relevant ones. A virtual assistant can assist through sharing of gated links to a landing page with content users may deem very important—important enough that they’re willing to give out valuable information in exchange for it.  

4. Livestream events 

Building connections with your interested pool of clients is also a task that can take up your valuable time. Basically, livestreaming events help to find relevant leads. An example of this is Google Hangouts. You can delegate your virtual assistant to help organize the event and to spread the word in order for people to register in advance. There may be instances where few people will attend during the actual Hangout but it also means they are one of the promising leads you’ve gathered.  By livestreaming events more often, you’re helping in building a notable platform in which people can reach out. 

At the end of the day, it’s your business, your company, and your work. However, one cannot deny the value given to a virtual assistant who not only helps in aiding and lessening the workload but also in improving a business’s social media presence, which is an important factor to have in today’s time. We live in a technologically advanced world that provides quick solutions to prevalent problems. Nowadays, quick solutions come in the form of trained professionals that are our virtual assistants. 

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