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Referenced Links:
- In Search of a Real Estate VA
- Dropbox
- 15 Known Secrets To Getting Started As A Virtual Assistant
- Upwork
- Social Media Examiner
- Hootsuite
- BeLive
Tweetables:
Be active on social media yourself if you’re interested in offering it as a service.
#vatip 
Gotta Tweet!
Clients look at your Facebook page as an example of your social media services.
#vatip Gotta Tweet!
Get started on your own Facebook page, not a personal profile. #vatip Gotta Tweet!
In Words:
In the title of the broadcast, it says In Search of a Real Estate VA. Now, if you’re now sure what a VA is, that’s a virtual assistant, and if this is a whole new thing, you’ve never heard of it, maybe you’ve only been on the page for a short time, you’re not sure what a VA is, you can go to TiffanyParson.com and get more information on what a virtual assistant is, how to get started as a virtual assistant. There’s some free training there as well as the podcast itself.
A couple of months ago – why am I saying a couple months ago? Recently, I received a message from someone that has a real estate business and she is looking for a real estate virtual assistant. Now, I read through this opportunity and it is a great, great project. It looks like it’s ongoing for the right person. I have already shared it with my email list so they got it first. They’ve had about an hour to look through. I’ve already seen some people clicking, checking it out. So I want to make that available to you here on the Facebook page in case you’re not on the VIP list. If you’re not on the list, why not? Go to TiffanyParson.com, hop on the list, get your free training for virtual assistants and be one of the first to know when we get project opportunities.
I’m going to post the link to that description, In Search of a Real Estate Virtual Assistant. I’m going to post that here. It’s in Dropbox. I’m going to post it there in the comments so that as you’re watching, you can just click that link and it’ll come up for you so you can get the full details. Has the complete details, exactly what she’s looking for and her contact information. Now, she included in there a resume. Most of the time, VA business owners, we don’t do resumes because we’re business owners. But that means she wants to know about your experience, so be sure to provide information on your experience.
We’re going to move on into the podcast episode and see how that goes. I know a lot of you listen from iTunes or Stitcher, or maybe this is your first time. You’ve never even heard of it. Maybe you’ve never even seen me before, so hi. Hi, hi, hi!
I posted the comment. There it is. That is the whole thing about In Search of a Real Estate VA. Click that link. Gives you the full details. It is a PDF. You can download it and talk to Lisa about her project.
On to today’s show, The Business of Being a Virtual Assistant. We’re on episode number 88. I mentioned earlier I have been doing this podcast for a few years now, and up until this point, it’s been all behind the scenes, me, my microphone, the computer, just looking right at it. I thought it’d be fun to go live with the video.
The topic for this week is a question I got from one of my listeners about proofing social media. When she says “proofing,” she means like correcting grammatically before it goes live, as a scheduled post or a live post. I’m going to pull up her question and read to you what her question is. I thought it would be perfect for the podcast because I don’t think she’s the only one with this question.
I’m going to read her question. I won’t read her email verbatim. I’ll leave out some of her personal information, but I will get the meat of the question, as well as what I sent her in email, and then elaborate on that a little more. As I’m answering this question, if you have any comments, just post them there on Facebook. I will see it pop up on the screen here and I’ll be happy to answer your question if it’s something I’m familiar with.
Here it goes. Now, give you a little background. She’s been listening to the podcast for a while and she is interested in getting started as a virtual assistant, so she’s been wanting to work from home. She has spent 14 years working the corporate life. I understand that. She desires to come home and work her own business. Here is what she says:
I was pleased to see that working with social media was mentioned in your 15 facts ebook because I’ve been wondering about this. I have quite a few friends who are trying to build their MLM business and they post on social media.
Now, this is not verbatim, but it’s a summary. One of the things that gets to her is seeing the posts with grammatical errors. Now, hey, all my posts aren’t perfect. They aren’t all grammatically correct. Sometimes you hear it in your head one way, you type out another, and then it comes out a third way and you have to tweak it or leave it.
Anyway, what she wants to do is offer proof of those posts before they go out, and she doesn’t want to come across as somebody that’s really crazy over grammatical errors, but she wants to be helpful. Her question for me was, “Is this a legitimate business opportunity?” as well as what’s the best way for her to start? She wants to know how should she begin. Should she do it free? What should she do?
Here is what I told her. One of the things that clients look for when you are doing social media services is they’re looking to see what you do on – I’m going to use Facebook since we’re here Facebook Live. They look to see what you do on your own Facebook page. Now, this is something I didn’t realize and maybe you have not realized that either as a VA, and that is that clients look at your Facebook page as an example.
Now, that may not always be the right way for them to look at your page as the example, because maybe you haven’t done a lot to grow your page. If your project, your role is to post on Facebook and social media – because that could be Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, wherever they want you to post. What you do in those areas may be a little different.
Your service is not to build their page – you really want your client to build their own page where they’re getting their own followers, their own likes, they’re doing that part themselves. What you want to do is, if you’re interested, and this social media is a service, it is a viable service, not just proofing alone. I would put it with scheduling social media and including proofing as an add-on, a benefit to your service that you will proof it.
You want to ask your client whether or not they want you to correct it grammatically, because they may not want the grammatical corrections because it’s for social media where people meet their friends and we’re being social, and so they may intend for the slang to be where it is. They may intend for the punctuation to be where it is, just how they want it. But maybe they want you to proof it to make sure that they’ve got the word “your” right or the spelling for something correctly. That may be something definitely they want you to check along with scheduling their social media.
One of the biggest things for you and any VA that’s interested in offering social media services is to be active on social media yourself. You want to be familiar with the places that you’re providing your service.
If your service is helping them with Facebook, then you want to know what are the options for scheduling on Facebook? What are the tools that I can use to do that? How frequently are they looking to post on Facebook? These are some questions you want to ask when you’re doing a preliminary interview with them regarding their project.
But it definitely is, to my listener, Celeste, it definitely is a legitimate business opportunity. I would, again, lump it with social media services and then put that in there, and then you’ll find out from each client. Some clients may want you to check the grammatical errors, some may not. It sounds like the posts that you’ve been seeing with your friends who are in MLM businesses, it sounds like theirs may be more professional than just the casual talk.
But I can almost guarantee you that those friends that you’re seeing on social media most likely are not going to be your clients. But you’re going to have a lot of other people, whether they’re in direct sales or other businesses that are using online tools, that are looking for you to jump in. You have the 15 Secrets eBook from my website. You have that, so you know one of the secrets is to get started on Upwork. If you do a search on there for social media, you’ll see what kinds of things people are looking for in regards to posting on social media.
The other thing is to get started on your own Facebook page. Not a personal profile, but get started on your own Facebook page and start posting things there. This is a way for you to get some experience, some practice, some knowledge about what’s happening with Facebook pages.
Also, find some good websites that give tips on social media and different things like that. There’s Social Media Examiner. That’s probably one of the main ones that I would look at for different updates, and you can even just do a Google search. Facebook.com. Facebook has their own blog that provides updates and information and things like that.
But the biggest thing is to actually get in there and to be active on your own Facebook business page and start posting all kinds of stuff to get a feel.
Post text, post images, post videos, post live videos to experience all the different things that your clients will do on their on social media, do them on yours. Post them live. Test out Hootsuite. Test out any other system that allows you to do auto-scheduling.
Let’s say they want you to do some things on Twitter. Same thing. Start posting text on Twitter, images. You can now go live on Twitter. You may not need to do that unless you just want to test it out. Your client, that’s something they would do on their own. But it’s good to just know what happens if you post an image. What happens if you schedule an image from Hootsuite? What does it look like in comparison to a live post?
That will make you a better social media virtual assistant because you have that knowledge. So if somebody asks you, you’ll know exactly how to answer that question. As you move along and you get questions that you don’t know the answer to, just jot those down, note it, so that you can find out for future reference.
I hope that helps, Celeste, and I’m excited that you’re a listener of the podcast. Keep listening and keep sending in your questions. You can always post your questions on my Facebook page. You can even submit your question via Twitter. Either way, I will get the question.
Again, I started off this particular live broadcast to let you know that this is my very first time testing out Facebook Live as a podcast live in order to record The Business of Being a Virtual Assistant podcast live. I will tell you, it is totally different from doing the audio. I should have put up a piece of paper right under the green dot on my screen so that I wouldn’t be tempted to look at my actual computer monitor, so that I could just stay focused.
That’s one of the things with audio, you know, you’re staring at the Audacity screen or whatever it is that people use. I use Audacity to record the audios. It doesn’t matter what you’re looking at or how close, but I should have screenshare. I’ll do that next time. That’s the only thing. But then I won’t be able to see comments or my agenda here, so I’ll have to think about that. So let me go back.
Again, thank you for hanging out with me. If you’re watching the replay, thank you so much for taking the time out. This is episode number 88 of The Business of Being a Virtual Assistant.
If this is your first time listening, I want to get your feedback on what you think about the live podcast.
Tell me where you listen to it. Did you listen to it on Facebook, or are you listening to it from iTunes, from Stitcher, or from the website directly? Let me know, and thanks again for taking out the time to hang out. You have a great day. I am going to get a little rest. I need some water, and I will see you next time.
I’m going to do this again next week. I record my podcast every single week and I think I love the live. I used to do live on BlogTalkRadio. It wasn’t video. It was still radio, but it was live. So I had to be here, and one thing with this that I really like with BeLive is that you had to be on time. If you weren’t on time, it would delete your broadcast. I was like, oh, I’ve got to be ready. I’ve got to ready, everything all set. I like that accountability for the part of the broadcast.
I will be back next week with this particular type broadcast. The Business of Being a Virtual Assistant. But I’ll be live some more over the weekend as well for other encouraging things on the Facebook page. But today was a whole big test about podcast live.
If you have an opening for new clients and you are interested in working with a real estate agent, click that link that’s in the comments. That Dropbox link is the details for the opportunity in search of a real estate VA, so check that out. All right, you have a great evening.
Thanks so much for tuning in. If you like what you heard, stay tuned. We’ll be back. Tell me what’s going on with you. Come on over the Facebook page: facebook.com/tiffanyparsonbiz, or if you prefer a little shorter message, come on over to Twitter: @tiffanydparson.
See you next time!
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