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Laura Nicole: 0:02

Welcome to Your Virtual Assistant Coach, the podcast for moms who want to make money from home on their own terms. I'm your host, Laura Nicole, a successful six-figure earning VA and coach who replaced my college professor's salary in just five months back in 2020 after my daughter was born, and I have never looked back. I'm here to help you build a profitable, flexible VA business that fits into your family's lives so you no longer feel like you're living just to work. Let's dive in.

Laura Nicole: 0:32

Today I want to talk to y'all about something that drives me honestly absolutely crazy about the virtual assistant industry and a massive myth, a massive falsehood that I see a ton of noise about online. I see tons of VA coaches telling women who want to get into this industry that they can be charging these high-ticket premium rates for services like social media management as a brand new virtual assistant. And that simply is not true. And the reason it's not true is because social media management is not a virtual assistant service, it is a completely different job. And pretending that they're the same is so misleading to so many new VAs thinking that they can start right out of the gate charging these high-ticket premium packages. And honestly, it just infuriates me.

Laura Nicole: 1:31

If you have hung out with me or listened to my podcast or hung out on a live on TikTok for any amount of time, you know that I truly am just like a straight shooter, no BS, very transparent, very real. And yes, you can make really freaking good money as a virtual assistant. Absolutely. But I get so frustrated when I see the industry dangling this wildly unrealistic carrot in front of the noses of these excited women who are so soaked to hop into the industry and make some money for their family from home because they think that they can hop into social media management and charge thousands and thousands of dollars per month per client right from the shoot. And that just is not reality. So in this episode, I am going to break down for you the actual difference between what a virtual assistant is and what a social media manager is. And just to make it very clear, I am not downplaying the virtual assistant service. It is so valuable. Clients need it, they will always need the social media support. I just really want to clarify and bust that myth and honestly kind of lie that's being put out there that a virtual assistant service is offering social media management because it just is not. And I know that it sounds so appealing, right? Big money, creative work. And when we're getting into something new where our goal is to make money, obviously we're gonna hear, ooh, premium pricing. And that's going to get us excited. But social media management is not a starter service, it is a very specialized role that requires strategy and marketing experience and creative direction because an actual social media manager is responsible for the actual strategy behind the social media platforms.

Laura Nicole: 3:26

So online business owners are hiring social media managers to do things like create their content strategy, write out their content plans, brainstorm the actual B-roll for videos, edit the videos, write the captions, research trends so that the business is keeping up with the trends online, hashtags, measuring their growth. And social media managers are brought on to create growth through strategy that they come up with, and clients expect an ROI. Clients are expecting results. They are expecting that as a result of the social media manager's work, they will have more followers, more leads, more sales. And that is why they're paid more. It is a premium service. Social media managers, their prices range all over the place, but they can literally charge you $3,000 a month to get like six reels made because it is a premium service.

Laura Nicole: 4:24

It is a marketing service, it is not admin support, right? A virtual assistant offers admin support. When we're supporting our business owners as a virtual assistant, our role is execution and organization. It is not strategy. So there are still a lot of ways that we can support our clients in their social media. And that can look like answering their DMs, right? Similar to how we answer their emails. If they get FAQs into their DMs, we can filter those and answer and take a bunch of them off their plate for them. Keeping their Instagram highlights up to date when they share to their stories, going in, watching them, automatically putting them on the highlight that they should be on, replying to comments if people have questions in the comments, replying there, creating basic graphics in Canva, whether it's for story slides or for a carousel to their feed post. It can even be things like tracking story engagement. Maybe they put a poll on their stories and they want to know which person responded on which poll item so that they can send a message to follow up with them. And it also can include uploading client-created content to schedule it out to post later for them. But the key here is that the client is creating the content. The client is writing the caption. And then you, as the VA, are offering the admin support of essentially being the middleman and scheduling it and making sure that their work actually gets posted again.

Laura Nicole: 5:56

Whereas the difference is that the social media manager would be the one coming up with that content idea. These social media support services that you can offer as a VA are so freaking needed. They save online business owners so much time and so much mental energy because you're helping them to stay consistent, organized, and engaged with their audience, which truly is incredibly valuable. But I'm hoping that you can see the difference here between what a virtual assistant helps with in terms of social media compared to what a social media manager is going to be delivering to clients. And the reason I get so fired up about this, if you can't tell, the reason I think it's so important for you to understand this difference, especially with how much noise there is about it online, is because I want to save you from overpromising and under-delivering. Again, clients are expecting a certain ROI when they are investing in a social media manager. And if you are brand new to this space and you're trying to hop in and offer those services, just being honest, you're probably not going to deliver on that ROI, which not only will be frustrating for the client, it will probably have a negative impact on your reputation as a VA. And it will likely have a pretty hard hit on your confidence as a VA because you will feel like, I don't know what I'm doing because you won't know what you're doing. But if we stay in the lane of offering social media assistance, social media support, whichever term you prefer, as a true virtual assistant, that is going to keep your confidence high because you're offering services that you actually know you can deliver on.

Laura Nicole: 7:46

There are so many wildly successful, well-paid VAs who build their businesses entirely around these admin style services because of the fact that they are dependable, they are sustainable, they are in huge freaking demand, and that's not going to change. So I don't want you to fall into that trap of feeling pulled by seeing the glit and the glitter and the lights and the high ticket and the premium pricing, because social media management is a marketing job. Virtual assistance is a support role. They're both valuable, but they are not the same. And that, my friends, is a hill that I am willing to die on.

Laura Nicole: 8:30

If you have been spinning your wheels trying to figure out what services you should offer or could offer, and you're finding yourself being confused by all of the different options that you're finding online when you're researching, I would love for you to come hang out with me for the next round of my four-day workshop because not only are we going to talk services that are popular, that are easy as an entry point into the industry, but I'm going to work together with you to help you determine exactly what services are a perfect match to your existing skill set so that you will in fact feel insanely confident offering those services out to your very first client. There will be no fake premium service promises. We're not going to offer you the moon and tell you that you can make $20,000 in your first month as a VA. But I will help you identify your real profitable skills and turn them into services that clients will be so thrilled to pay you for right now. The link to save your seat for that workshop is in the show notes. So go ahead and check that out.

Laura Nicole: 9:44

If you loved this episode, be sure to share it with your best friend, your sister, or even your favorite coworker who you know wants to start making a flexible income. I'll see you all next time.