Hannah Edwards of Empowered VA Services shares why Social Media Day is important in her business

It’s June already and we’re halfway through the year. It’s also officially the first month of Summer, and the weather has been brilliant albeit a little stormy! This month we’re asking small business owners to tell us more about what’s happening for them throughout June!

Up today is Hannah Edwards, of Empowered VA Services, a virtual assistant and social media manager who has been in business for six years. She supports a variety of clients in the UK, US and Switzerland, with different tasks and is looking forward to a crazy 2023!

June 30 is Social Media Day – what does social media mean to you and your business? What are your favourite social media platforms? What, for you, are the pros and cons of social media?
Social Media Day is a huge day for me in my business. As a social media manager, I think it would be foolish for me not to acknowledge the day dedicated to it! Personally, I love being able to connect with family and friends who don’t live in Swindon. It’s also a way for me to keep up with everyone in my town that I haven’t managed to see recently.

My favourite platform has to be Instagram. I love being able to have the ability to catch someone’s eye with a post. Bright and colourful work amazingly for my clients.

There are so many pros and cons to social media. It’s a minefield and one that everyone should tread carefully with the way scammers are starting to use it now.

My pros include:

1. Being able to offer social media in my business and supporting my clients to promote their businesses. Social media can take up so much time and it takes away from the really important tasks in the business that they need to do. By outsourcing their social media to me, I get to do something I love which is supporting people within their business and they get to concentrate on the important tasks for their clients.
    
2. Like I said above the ability to catch up with family and friends. I get to see what my godchildren have been up to. If they have had an event at school or spent time doing activities in the summer holidays and I haven’t been able to be there, I can still see what they’ve done and talk to them about it.
    
3. Being able to join groups with people all over the world who have the same interests as me is a huge bonus. I’m a member of some groups about social media, being a virtual assistant and one for people who use Canva and everyone teaches each other new ways of designing things.
    

As I said above social media is a minefield and with it comes some cons as well:

1. People only show the ‘glam’ which can really affect your mindset. Some people say they’re showing you the behind the scenes of their day to day, but it makes running a business look so easy that you start to question if you’re doing something wrong. If you ever feel like this my advice would be to schedule your posts and then step away for the rest of the day and if you need to, the following day as well.
    
2. Scammers have become rife since Covid-19 and it’s getting more and more difficult to tell the fake profiles from the real ones. These accounts are trying to convince you to give them money or to get you to click on a link that means that they can hack your account. This is especially hard for a small business who has built up a significant following. If they are hacked and lose that, they’ve lost their whole customer base. I would advise that people also build up a mailing list and their website. You don’t own your social media platforms so if you’re hacked, you risk the platform saying that they won’t recover the account for you.
    
3. Bullying has become a huge problem since social media was invented. It used to be that if you were bullied at school or at work then you could come home and have a break from it. The invention of social media means that the bullying can continue, and you don’t get that break. Fake accounts mean that people can bully you and you don’t have proof of who it is. Social media reviews on Facebook can also be easily posted, good or bad, and if you want to take a bad review down it’s the most difficult process to go through to try and get Facebook to remove it. This means it’s perfect for people to bombard your page with fake reviews and your reputation gets damaged during the time it takes for the platform to remove them.
    

I could go on but the list is endless so if you want to discuss social media more then visit my website at www.empoweredvaservices.co.uk or email me on [email protected]