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What Makes a Good Red Desk VA
What Makes a Good Red Desk VA
Over the years Red Desk has built up a number of loyal clients; we tend to work with our clients across several areas of business support, and may begin by offering them social media but then spread our services depending on their needs.
As with all SMEs growing your business and taking on new staff is always a challenge. Our challenge is finding VAs that have a wide skill set to match our clients’ needs. Each of our VAs have their specialist areas but the broader their skill set the greater benefit to us and our clients.
We have recently been recruiting to expand our team and thought we’d share our thoughts.
Skills and Experience
There are many different VA and PA companies out there and each differs greatly with the services they offer, some are very much secretarial or concierge based others, like Red Desk offer a broader business support.
At Red Desk, we support a number of SMEs with their online reputation, online marketing and social media. We therefore tend to look for VAs who have experience in using social media management tools, writing content for posts and managing social media accounts on behalf of clients. It is important for us to have reliable VAs who can step in and support each other at busy times and to cover holidays.
However a VA with skills in project management, property management and content writing are a huge asset as well. With a team of VAs covering all these skill sets we can offer clients a complete package when it comes to supporting their businesses.
Recruiting
We found we couldn’t find the right kind of VA for our business through formal advertising. On previous attempts we’ve posted a job advert on sites including LinkedIn but many enquiries came from overseas which isn’t the right fit for our business.
We’ve found the best ways of finding suitable VAs for our business are:
- Our networks – we are in touch with people via schools, clients and even social networks
- Facebook groups – local VAs or PAs often advertise their services in these groups which make it easier for us to approach them
- Next Door – This is our new favourite go-to website where locals ask questions, post recommendations or even sell items. We’ve asked to connect with local VAs and were contacted by a number in the area
Business Direction
Once a Red Desk VA has demonstrated a talent for a new area of business, we can add this to our website list of services. As well as being able to supply our clients with the services they need we also attempt to attract clients that work in fields that match our VAs. With this in mind we can help our VAs to further their careers in the areas they wish to pursue as well as being able to offer skilled support to our clients.
Recently we have been able to add HR and market research to our website due to some excellent feedback from clients.
We hope to be able to provide work and support to local VAs for many years to come.
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Social Media for Schools
Social Media for Schools
We recently undertook some social media training for schools for London Grid for Learning (@LGfL) along with the wonderful Katy Potts (@katypotts) and Matthew Beevor (@mbeevor) from Islington Council.
We focused on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram but also looked at how to utilise your Google Local Entry.
The session covered types of content best suited for each platform; ensuring your social media accounts are optimised and set up correctly; social media policy and GDPR; then finally some best practise and practical tips for managing your social media.
A school’s social media and digital footprint is now an essential part of their marketing and PR strategy. It is not only a great way to improve communications with parents but it is also used by prospective parents and indeed even Ofsted will search out a school online before a visit. It is therefore essential for schools to take ownership of their online reputation rather than leave it to chance.
Social media can show your school is active and engaging as part of your local community and indeed even globally. Many schools look for sponsorship from local businesses for their school fairs and fundraisers, and what better way than to reach out to them on twitter for example. All small businesses are using twitter as a cost effective form of marketing so they will be delighted if your school engages with them online.
Social media is a great way of building connections with outside organisations, use it to join an already established campaign or indeed create your own campaign and hashtag. Use it to highlight your school and your pupils’ achievements. In this way the advantages from social media far outweigh the negatives, as long as you set out a clear social media policy.
When creating a social media policy, decide who will have access, what type of content you will share and what tone you will use. Ensure your parents have consented to images of their children being used but also have a policy around what sort of images can be used, (perhaps you don’t allow close ups of pupils but rather cleverly set up images that convey the event without highlighting individuals). Your social media policy should also include how school trips are represented, locations should not be divulged so perhaps share the trips images the following day rather than immediately.
Your school’s Google Business Profile is more than likely going to be the first thing a user sees when searching online, even before your website, so it makes sense to make the most of it. Claim your entry and add good images and location details. Google have recently created the option of ‘posting’ to your entry, this is added content that will be tagged to your entry and is a brilliant way to market upcoming events and even available school places.
There is a great deal to think about when setting up your school’s social media but using it well could greatly improve your schools profile and sharing positive content will only help to maintain your school’s online reputation.
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