Social Media has become the most important component in a lot of people’s lives.

Facebook tops the list of social networking sites that people frequently visit and that it has continually been a haven for advertisers to mine valuable customers since its inception. As more internet marketers turn to Facebook advertising to unlock new opportunities, they eventually get to a point where they need help in running it.

Facebook advertising is tedious. It takes constant effort and you really have to stay on top of the ever changing Facebook algorithm, as well as constantly monitoring ads to ensure profitability. As a result, most entrepreneurs have a difficult time personally handling Facebook Advertising while also focusing on their core business and growth.

So people look for ways to “hand off” some parts of Facebook Advertising to a virtual assistant. We’ll give you a few tips about hiring someone to help with your Facebook advertising, should you choose to outsource to the Philippines.

Why Filipino Workers Have An Advantage

Before we go any further, let’s go over a few realities about outsourcing to the Philippines, because it’s something you may not have thought about before:

• Filipinos are taught English in school. As a result, most college educated Filipinos are fluent in reading/writing English.
• Many outsourced call centers have physical locations in the Philippines, thus many Filipino workers have experience working with global customers, and speaking fluent English.
• Most Filipinos looking for work are internet savvy, which can be a tremendous benefit to your business.
• Filipinos are amongst the top social media users in the world. No need to teach them how to use Facebook. And there’s a big chance they already know more about social media than you do.

This doesn’t mean that everything is perfect and you’ll be able to find a superstar who can take most of your Facebook marketing work off your hands. Like any employee, you will need to provide training on what you need and how you want things done.

Now that we’ve covered that, I want to tell you what I think is the biggest mistake people make when outsourcing:

They expect to hand everything off to someone else, let them handle everything, and wait for the results.

If you are able to find this, consider yourself lucky. Most of us don’t get the benefit of a fairy tale outsourcing experience.

This causes most entrepreneurs to look for someone with the most experience, so they don’t have to work with any training or education. This can be a good or bad thing. It can be good if you’re fortunate enough to find someone who has been trained properly. It can be bad if you find people who have been trained in tactics that are currently ineffective or worse, detrimental, in the current advertising environment.

Essential Skills To Look For In Your Filipino VA

What you need, when you’re looking for a virtual assistant to help with Facebook Advertising, are the following:

1. Attention to detail.

This is critical because people can be brutal on social media. People will judge you and your business if you make a single mistake and that mistake could cost you your business. You don’t want your businesses to suffer from a simple typo in a Twitter post.

You need someone who pays attention to the little things and picks up on minor details. I don’t think there’s any workaround for this. While you may not find someone who can write perfectly, you definitely want someone who picks up on misspellings and minor errors.

2. Flexibility and willingness to learn.

Someone who thinks they know it all and has it all figured out will be awful at social media as it’s constantly changing and evolving. Even the best social media managers constantly test, experiment and try new things. There is no way a virtual assistant will be successful at social media work if they refuse to learn new skills and knowledge.

3. Tenacity.

You can’t hire someone who is easily discouraged. You will fail at Facebook advertising probably more times than you succeed. Your employee has to have the tenacity to get knocked down and get back up and give it another go.

4. Excellent research skills.

If you are interviewing someone who always asks you for answers, you probably will not be able to hand off your social media. Social media requires constant research on the latest trends. Whether it’s trending hashtags, keyword research, competition analysis, rank tracking, continuing education, it is a research oriented profession. If the prospective employee is lacking in research fundamentals, don’t proceed!

5. Software fluency.

It’s difficult to do social media manually. You need someone who is a bit of a whiz with both desktop and web-based software. They should already have experience using a few tools, even if you’re not using those specific tools.

This isn’t an all-inclusive-list-everything you need to look for, but it covers the ones that are usually a big deal.

Read it, re-read it and make sure you understand it. Please do not deviate from this list, these are the essentials. Not the traits that would be nice or good to have, these are the must-haves.

How To Screen Your VA Job Applicants

Having said all of that, what is a good screening test for hiring a social media virtual assistant

Facebook Insights

This is what separates a social media professional from casual Facebook users.

Only people who are serious about social media know where the insights are and how to interpret them. These are the people who analyze each post, study the copy and image to figure out what works and what doesn’t. They know which posts are more likely to go viral and which ones would fail.

So if you’re going to do a test task, ask them to explain to you your Facebook Page insights. What do the numbers mean and why some posts work better than others.

If they can give you a report that explains their insights, you’re one step closer to finding a great Facebook VA. Because if they know how to use FB insights, learning how to do FB ads (if they don’t know this yet) would be a breeze.

A Filipino VA who knows how to use FB insights shows initiative (it’s not exactly an easy feature to find) and willingness to learn new things. If he or she knows why some posts work or not, it means they’re quick studies, they pay attention to detail, and again, they’re showing initiative on making sure their personal Facebook pages work. You’re looking for existing character traits you can build upon.

This is what a lot of employers get wrong. They look for specific skill sets like a list of software the candidate has installed and knows how to use. Skills can be taught. It’s extremely difficult to teach these other things and quite frankly, as an entrepreneur, you probably don’t have the resources to do it.

Ready, Set, Go!

I hope we’ve given you solid information that helps you understand the process of outsourcing your Facebook ads management. The great thing is you can hire someone with a college education and work experience for anywhere from $450-750 per month, from part time to full time work. Just imagine what you could do with that much help with FB ads. Just think of how much you can grow with someone dedicated to working on your social media full time!

Having said that, let’s talk about the elephant in the room.

Have you heard outsourcing alarming stories? Yes!

Can things go wrong? Absolutely.

Have you heard detestable stories of hiring regular employees? Absolutely!

So where am I going with this?

Any time you hire someone you have some risk involved, a chance that things won’t work out and you’ve wasted money and/or time. The biggest tip I can give you is to take outsourcing as seriously as you would hiring a regular employee. Most people are stringent with “real world” hiring but treat outsourcing as though they can just find the “perfect profile”, hire the person and things magically fall into place. You would not treat a regular hire that way and outsourcing is no different.

And the great thing about this is you can hire and train Filipino VAs to do practically any type of job for your business. You can hire an SEO VA, a real estate VA, you can even hire Filipino writers to do your content for you. Everything is possible with the right hiring, training and management of Filipino workers.

With all of that said, we have a few resources for you.

1. First, bookmark this page so you can get back to it.
2. You can get Outsourcing Lever (it’s free) if you love to read and want to learn more about outsourcing.
3. You can search our database for qualified Filipinos looking for work.
4. You can join our Facebook group if you want feedback from other employers, just like you.
5. Or you can go to OneVAAway.com if you need a step-by-step guide on how to hire a virtual assistant.

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About John Jonas

John Jonas is a long-time outsourcing expert and the creator of OnlineJobs.ph.

Since 2005, John has taught hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs how to profitably delegate to VAs in the Philippines (and get their lives back in the process).

With help from his own VAs based in the Philippines, John has created an outsourcing empire that allows him to work 17 hours/week and to spend most of his time with his wife and 5 kids.

Find John at JohnJonas.com and Facebook.

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