How to Create a Social Media Style Guide for Your Virtual Assistants?

Having a good style guide allows you to entrust most of your social media efforts to a qualified remote virtual assistant without having to go over details. Appropriate virtual assistant training materials will pave the path for a fruitful relationship. You can ensure the job is done according to your specifications by providing clear instructions.

Outsourcing social media management to remote virtual assistants allows you to focus on other vital aspects of increasing the company’s profitability while ensuring that critical information is accurately portrayed.

What is a Style Guide for Social Media?

A social media style guide is a comprehensive overview of your brand’s social media presence. After reviewing this style guide, the remote virtual assistant can quickly identify the type of content to post on social media while maintaining personality, tone, and manner.

This tutorial can help you enhance your social media management skills while retaining brand identity across several channels.

Some Topics to Think About While Creating a Style Guide

• Which voice do you prefer? Formal? Casual? First-person? Second individual?
• How frequently do you want to post?
• What topics do you wish to write about?
• Are there any terms or phrases you want to avoid?
• Do you want to make use of hashtags? Which ones, if any?
• What kind of photographs are you looking for?
• Do you intend to use hyperlinks in your posts? If that’s the case, where should they go?
• Is there a specific call to action that you want to use regularly?

How to Create a Social Media Style Guide for Your Virtual Assistants

To create a thorough social media style guide for a 24 7 virtual assistant, read on the following:

Accounts on Social Media

Make a list of social media accounts and links to them. Even if you aren’t currently utilizing them, you may want the Virtual Assistants to incorporate them in your social media management plan in the future.

• Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, and other social media sites
• Platforms for sharing media: Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, Tiktok, and so on.
• Quora, Reddit, Snapzu.com, Notabug.io, and more forums

Description of Voice and Tone

Ensure consistency across all channels; your virtual assistant should have specific voice and tone guidelines. A consistent brand voice is essential for retaining loyal customers. Followers should be able to recognize your posts without having to search up the account name when scrolling through their social media stream.

The following are examples of familiar voice and tone standards:

• Always be respectful and professional.
• Make use of industry jargon.
• Maintain an optimistic attitude.
• Maintain consistency in tenses. 

Some Examples of Voice

Inspiring, down-to-earth, educational, motivating, serious, professional, masculine/feminine, bold, confident, aggressive, elegant, empowering, uplifting, romantic, and so on

Some Examples of Tones

Serious, Grumpy, Sad, Sinister, Scary, Creepy, Humorous, Genuine, Plainspoken, Functional, Positive, Considerate, Informative, etc.

When developing your social media management strategy and distributing material online, it is critical to maintaining a respectful and professional demeanor at all times. Don’t say anything online that you wouldn’t know in person. Give your 24 7 virtual assistants some examples of your company’s voice. Following that, a brief example of each tone should be provided. Other corporations, such as Uber, Coca-Cola, Tiffany, Harley-Davidson, and others, may be able to assist you in deciphering techniques.

Manual of Style

It is critical to maintaining consistency in both voice and style across all platforms when developing content for your social media networks. Writing a style guide for your company will ensure that your material is always on-brand, regardless of who is creating it.

Even though your social media posts are only a few words long, you should adhere to the style guide you’ve established for other materials such as blogs, posts, advertisements, white papers, and so on. If you haven’t already started using a style manual, now is the moment.

Style manual examples include:

• Associated Press (AP) stylebook
• MLA (Modern Language Association)
• APA (American Psychological Association)
• CMS (Chicago Manual of Style)
• framework

Each style handbook is well-known to skilled and experienced remote virtual assistants. If they are unfamiliar with the one you want them to use, they can rapidly learn using free internet resources. Some of these style books are pretty strict and require much study.

Format and Language

In the style guide, you should also provide a language description to provide a clear image of the type of language and formatting you expect. To avoid misunderstanding and anarchy, here are a few things you must describe:

Jargon

Some professional vocabulary is appropriate for specific audiences. Others, though, may not comprehend it. So, specify which terminology is acceptable for your social media posts and which should be avoided.

Length of the Content

Keep your sentences short and straightforward while writing on social media. This will make your material more readable and likely to be shared. Your remote virtual assistant should have a standard maximum word count and sentence count numbers to guarantee that your articles are on-brand and successful.

Emojis

If you wish to use emojis, GIFs, or stickers in your entries, decide ahead of time. If you do, which are appropriate and which are not? Give your 24 7 virtual assistant a list of emojis that you want them to include.

Placement of a CTA (Call To Action)

If you want to add CTAs to your social media posts, let the remote virtual assistant know (e.g., “once a week, at the end of the post” or “every day, amid the post”).

Acronyms

Do you believe your target audience understands acronyms, or do you want the virtual assistants to explain them? Make a list of unknown terms that do not require translation.

Formatting

Is there a specific format for your postings (e.g., headline, content, link hashtag)? Include it in the instruction manual; otherwise, future attempts will suffer from inconsistency with earlier work.

Times and dates

Do you want the dates formatted as May 2nd, 2022, or May 2nd, 2022? This type of formatting may appear insignificant, yet it is critical for consistency.

Hashtags

Make a list of hashtags to use on each social media network regularly. Creating an exhaustive list of language and format criteria may be challenging, but style guides can and should be updated over time. Hashtags are an excellent technique to reach a larger audience on social media. They should, however, be used sparingly and only when they offer value to the content.

Visuals

Your postings’ visual appeal is likely to influence their success significantly. The style guide should include information that will make photographs appealing to the target audience while remaining consistent across all social media channels. Here are some things to think about:

1. Colors and their mixtures
2. Font
3. The font size
4. Photos
5. Logos
6. Image dimensions
7. Images/videos are not permitted.

 You may also give a source of images and connect the audience to the creative team if necessary.

Guidelines for Networks

However, specific platforms require more attention than others. Some instances of network-specific rules are as follows:

• Twitter: Each post must include at least one hashtag. Tweets should be trimmed, with the maximum length limited to 200 words and a reduced number of characters.
• Facebook: If necessary, remove URLs and insert line breaks.
• YouTube: Video descriptions (with keywords) should be supplied for SEO purposes.
• Cover picture: The same image should be used for all social media sites’ covers.

The articles on one platform may appear massive on another. When VA seeks to edit the material, they should know which standards to adhere to.

Proofreading

Make sure that the remote virtual assistant proofreads the content before sharing it with the rest of the world. A few errors here and there might make you appear unprofessional, which is something no one wants.

Virtual Assistants for Social Media Management

Excellent social media management requires consistency. A new employee might utilize this guide to get a decent idea of how your social media postings should look and sound.

A well-designed style guide can keep everyone, from your team to the VA, on the same page. It’s a living document that will evolve and alter as your brand does.

With a detailed and thoroughly written style guide, guiding a VA in social media management should be quick and easy.

If you are seeking the best VA for social media management, contact EFFICISE.COM.

Some General Guidelines for Developing Style Guides

• Keep it short and sweet.
• Prioritize the most important aspects first.
• Use simple language that everybody may comprehend.
• Maintain consistency in your language, abbreviations, and capitalization.
• When possible, include examples.
• As the brand changes, the guide should be updated regularly.

A style guide can be a powerful tool for social media management, ensuring that the business is portrayed consistently across all channels. You may rest easy knowing that your social media is in good hands if you have a well-crafted style guide.

Conclusion

Hiring virtual assistants will be advantageous, particularly in easing the stress of a large workload. It is both practical and financially sound for the company. However, before delegating company tasks like social media management to a virtual assistant, you should create a guide they can follow to ensure everything is in order.

With this guide’s help, you can delegate your social media tasks to your remote virtual assistant without any problem. Vgrow aids businesses in their hunt for the Best Virtual Assistant Services. Contact us, and we’ll discuss your company’s requirements.