10 LinkedIn Projects Your Assistant Can Handle for You

To have a truly authentic presence on LinkedIn, you have to do at least some of the work yourself. But your executive assistant or virtual assistant can handle the most time-consuming activities for you — so you can leverage the most value from your time.

And if you’re considering hiring a virtual assistant but aren’t sure you have enough work for them, completing LinkedIn activities for you is a valuable way to utilize their time when you don’t have other projects for them work on.

Let’s look at how to delegate or outsource LinkedIn activities effectively. The first step is to get clear on your goals.

Identify Strategic Ways to Use LinkedIn

Begin by defining your purpose for being active on LinkedIn. Depending on the stage of your business, your current goals for using social media may be to:

• • Position yourself as a thought leader
  • Generate leads or referrals
  • Create brand awareness
  • Attract top talent
  • Position yourself for your next opportunity (such as a board role)

You also want to determine which people matter to you the most right now. Is your focus primarily internal or external? Consider the following and decide who you most want to direct your messaging to:

• • Customers
  • Partners
  • Employees
  • Peers
  • Leadership team
  • Media

And then consider what topics you want to talk about:

• • What are your core areas of expertise? What do you want to be known for?
  • Do you have initiatives you want to promote?
  • What causes matter to you? Diversity, sustainability, homelessness, accessibility, work/life balance, etc.?
  • Is there something personal that you use to relate to people? Perhaps you run, play golf, are a parent, or foster animals. Personal posts often receive more attention and generate more engagement than business-related posts.

Once you define your purpose, audience, and topics for your content, a good portion of the rest of your LinkedIn strategy will fall into place.

But you need to make sure your assistant understands the big picture. The return on your time investment here will be greater than you may imagine. You’ll spend less time answering questions and clarifying your directions, and you’ll get much better results!

Create a System

Keeping up with any kind of social media is a recurring task — which means you can design a system for your assistant to execute.

Define rules about what can be done without your approval, what should be brought to your attention, and what you need to sign off on.

With straightforward rules determined from the get-go, you’ll have fewer decisions to make and spend less time on approvals. And the longer your assistant handles LinkedIn for you, the less of your time will be needed.

Delegate Execution

The more clearly you define the projects you want completed, the easier it will be for your assistant to implement and execute them. Here are 10 LinkedIn projects you can have your assistant take on for you:

1. Create a content calendar. You can work with your assistant to define a rough editorial calendar, identifying a core theme for each month. Or you can rotate topics across the areas you defined earlier.

    

2. Curate content. Some of your posts can come from your company’s page. Your assistant can also identify other content that can be shared. Make sure they know where to find quality content. For example, you can suggest that they review your local business journal, industry publications/portals, the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, the Economist, or McKinsey Quarterly.

    

3. Create new content. Have your assistant look for opportunities to create content. They can take pictures of you or your team in action, use Canva to create images that include your favorite quotes, and post about volunteer projects. They can also take raw video footage, edit it, add captions, and prepare it for upload.

    

4. Create evergreen posts. Identify quality content from your website and other sources that can be shared at any time. Your assistant can pull items from this content library when you don’t have anything else going on.

    

5. Nurture relationships. Monitor posts from clients, partners, employees, your leadership team, and other stakeholders. Your assistant can like these posts and bring anything important to your attention.

    

6. Monitor competitors. Your assistant can keep an eye on what your organization’s competitors are doing and let you know when they find anything relevant. Suggest that they use anonymous mode and view content while signed in to their own account.

    

7. Build lists. Tell your assistant what types of people make good prospects or referral sources. They can do the research to identify people who meet those criteria and build a list of them in a spreadsheet. You can review the list and decide how you want to approach them.

    

8. Research hashtags. Your assistant can look for new hashtags to use in your posts. Just make sure they are relevant, and not just trending and used for the sake of using them.

    

9. See what’s trending. Connecting with topics that are catching attention and posts that are going viral can keep you in the loop with your audience. Your assistant can use current trends to inform some of the content they create for you.

    

10. Track metrics. Your assistant can track KPIs and report back to you each month, sharing information about what worked best and recommendations for the coming month.

LinkedIn provides projects that are ideal for an executive assistant or virtual assistant to work on to help you build and maintain an authentic presence on the platform. Your assistant is deeply involved in managing your calendar, so they know what your priorities are, who matters to you, what events you are participating in, and what you can talk about.

So much of what you do on LinkedIn takes time. And when your assistant handles the bulk of the heavy lifting, you gain considerable leverage — you reap the results with a minimal investment of effort.

Plus, the projects are flexible. They can be expanded or reduced to fill the amount of time your assistant has available.

Need help?

We can create a strategic plan for your assistant to execute and provide any training they may need. We can also support your assistant as they work on LinkedIn projects for you, saving you both even more time. We will work with them to design a content plan for the coming month, debug lead generation campaigns, answer questions, troubleshoot problems, provide feedback and recommendations, and interpret results. To find out more, contact [email protected].