What Exactly Does A Virtual Assistant Do, Anyway?

If you’ve only started searching for online job opportunities, chances are you’ve come across several job listings for virtual assistant (VA for short). And from there, your next question to yourself most likely was – what exactly does a virtual assistant do, anyway?

The long and short answer: just about anything your employer can legitimately and rightfully ask you to do.

Five Most Commonly Assigned Tasks to Virtual Assistants

Since most members of #teamhomebased have had previous experience working as virtual assistants (or are currently working as one even), we’ve decided to put our heads together and come up with a list of the most commonly assigned tasks for VAs.

Hopefully, this list will help you determine if you have what it takes to be a virtual assistant (and a good one at that).

Content creation

Think how-to articles, blog posts, and even news reports. You may be asked to rewrite an existing article or come up with your own angle on any given topic. In most cases, there’s also a word count involved; last time I heard, the minimum was anything between 300 to 500 words, but it could be more or less, depending on your employer.

P.S. More often than not, employers tend to care most about how informative your articles are and how quickly you can deliver the required post. In our experience, they won’t really mind if you occasionally use the wrong preposition here or there as long as the resulting article is coherent and effectively delivers the message it’s supposed to deliver. (Then again, YMMV.)

Social media management

VAs are often put in charge of regularly posting new content on their company’s social media platforms. These may include but are definitely not limited to Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. You may also be asked to make the appropriate replies to comment, keep track of page insights, and come up with ads to attract more social media followers.

When managing social media accounts of your employer, the most important rules to remember is to

l   You are representing your employer or the company you’re working for so always post accordingly.

l   Check, double-check, triple-check everything before clicking Post!

Basic photo editing

As far as our experiences go, most VA employers aren’t fussy about which photo editing app you’re used to working with as long as you get the job done. Aside from cropping and blurring, you may also be frequently asked to add texts and other basic effects to your photos (and videos, too, in some cases).

P.S. There’s no need to worry if you don’t have this particular skillset yet. You can self-study right now with the help of free tutorials on YouTube and other platforms.

SEO

Although SEO has been around for ages, people new to working online typically have no idea what search engine optimization is all about, much less how to incorporate it in their résumé. Well, the good news: just like photo editing, it’s very easy to research about SEO now and learn everything you need about it on your own, and for free, too.

P.S. SEO know-how is usually a non-negotiable requirement for most VA jobs so please invest the appropriate time in understanding how SEO works.

P.P.S. Gain competitive advantage over other VA applicants by understanding how local optimization works in terms of SEO.

Basic HTML

Like we said earlier on, VAs are basically expected to do anything and everything, which is why aside from being a social media manager, photo editor, and so forth, you’re also expected to know how to tweak your company’s website when asked.

While you’re certainly not required to be at par with any professional programmer or web developer, most VAs nowadays are expected to possess working knowledge of HTML (think: embedding posts, installing plug-ins, etc.).

And again, no worries – you may learn all of these for free online.

Aside from the five tasks listed above, we also thought it prudent to let you know that more and more employers nowadays prefer VAs who are willing and able to communicate with them over the phone or through video chats (think Skype, Viber, Line, WhatsApp, etc.).

While this particular function doesn’t require you to speak with an American accent, it does require – to a certain degree – that you be comfortable speaking in English. If you feel you’re too shy or you’re uncomfortable with this type of setup, that’s okay. It might take more time than usual, but as long as you look hard and long enough, you’ll eventually find the perfect virtual assistant job for you.