Best Instagram Virtual Assistant (Everything You Need to Know)
An Instagram virtual assistant is a type of remote worker who can execute various tasks on Instagram to help you achieve your goals. You might want to increase your followers. Perhaps you need to boost your sales or lead generation campaigns. It doesn’t matter if your account is new or if you’ve already got 2,000 followers, an extra pair of hands can certainly help you.
This guide will aid you in identifying what type of assistant you need, explain why you need one, as well as help you hire the best Instagram virtual assistant for your account or business.
Table of Contents
- Why Hire an Instagram Virtual Assistant?
- What Can an Instagram Virtual Assistant Do?
- Virtual Assistant VS Instagram Bots
- 5 Best Instagram Virtual Assistant Agencies
- I’m new, can you help me decide?
Why Hire an Instagram Virtual Assistant?
An Instagram VA can help you accomplish two end-goals of starting an Instagram business account:
- Creating a large following
- Selling more products and/or services.
The first one is easy. Unfortunately, it’s also tedious and requires a lot of patience since the steps involved can be repetitive. Generating revenue through Instagram, however, requires careful targeting.
You can grow your followers to 1,000 in a month by spending 4 hours a day posting images, following other accounts, liking and commenting on other posts, messaging people about what you do. But if you’re not targeting the right audience, you’re not gonna get much engagement on your posts let alone earn revenue from selling on Instagram no matter how many followers you’ve got.
You need an Instagram staff (preferably someone who knows what he’s doing) to create a proper strategy and implement it consistently until you start seeing the results you want. But why outsource and not just do it yourself?
You might NOT actually have the time to do all the tasks required. After all, you have a business to run, don’t you? You can try. But I’m telling you it requires a lot of uninspiring work that would suck the life out of you.
This is why a lot of businesses’ Instagram pages are usually left out from marketing efforts, which is a big waste because Instagram is a phenomenal platform for selling products/services and increasing brand awareness (1+ billion users per month). Don’t be that company!
Focus on your core business tasks and hire an expert to manage your Instagram account. If done right, your Instagram ROI will be a pleasant surprise.
What Can an Instagram Virtual Assistant Do?
It doesn’t take a genius to run an Instagram, account but it does take blood, sweat, and tears. The tasks involved may be too time-consuming for you to do alone but a dedicated part-time assistant should be enough to handle them.
Account Optimization
Firstly, if you’re not an Instagram expert, chances are that your account is not as optimized as it could be. When we say account optimization, this means having your brand or business’s essential information in plain sight and inserting appropriate calls to action in your profile. An Instagram virtual assistant could optimize your account to match your goals.
Optimizing your account is crucial to everything from selling more products/services to branding. Don’t take it for granted.
Some account elements your virtual assistant can enhance include your bio description, nametag, Highlights, hashtag placement, linked accounts, website links, etc.
Messaging Targeted Potential Customers
You can rest assured that a proper Instagram VA can filter the right audience for your business/brand and do some outreach on your behalf. Why message them? For exposure and selling of course!
Here’s a sample of how this could work:
- You craft an “initial message” template that talks about your brand/business or products/services.
- Your assistant sends them out to several targeted accounts daily (not reaching the 50 daily limit of course)
- If an interested account replies, you may take over and close since you know how to sell your brand/business better.
There are some variations to this. You could rely on the VA to do this end-to-end depending on how well they know your brand/services, but I recommend you do the closing yourself or have a capable and experienced team member take over at least until you can trust the VA to do this important task.
Content Strategy
A lot of business accounts don’t take content strategy very seriously, and they usually pay the price later on. You could miss out on a whole lot of branding opportunities if you don’t properly plan out your content and keep it consistent.
Some of the tasks involved include:
- Identifying your goals — Content should match your goals. For instance, if you want to sell your products, your posts should highlight its benefits in a subtle way.
- Creating a content theme that matches your brand — Instagram is a visual platform. Your colors, fonts, and filters should reflect your brand. Another thing to consider is the format of your posts (single image, carousel post, branded videos, stories, IGTV).
- Creating a content calendar — A content calendar will dictate how often your account should post, at what time, and what should be posted.
Let’s explore some examples of accounts with proper content strategies.
Remoteyear provides programs for travelling to amazing locations across the globe and joining a remote working community. They showcased that through their posts, which display the spectacular views available in their locations. They also appear to use the same filter for most of their images.
HubspotAcademy is a leader in providing free online courses for sales, marketing, customer service, and many more. As you can see from their posts, their font, colors, and style remain consistent with their branding all throughout.
Content Creation and Posting
After strategizing the type of content for your brand, you’re gonna need to consistently create content and post them. This can be a very time-consuming process but luckily, it can be easily outsourced.
An Instagram assistant can easily craft your images/carousels on Canva and post them at the right time.
Posting can either be done manually or through a scheduler tool; each has its own advantages and drawbacks. I recommend using a tool if you post more than twice per day. If not, manual is the better way to go.
Hashtag Research
Hashtags are the main factors to organic growth. Knowing the right hashtags early on will save you a lot of wasted marketing efforts. This is something you may have already done yourself if you have an Instagram account. Nonetheless, you can still benefit from having someone else do another round of hashtag research.
You need to have as many targeted hashtags as possible since the 30 is the limit for hashtags in each post and posts should not have the same copy-pasted hashtags.
Follower Engagement
Once your account grows, so does your follower engagement; that is, if you did it right and didn’t cut corners. Once this happens, you need to consistently engage back otherwise your followers will start thinking you don’t care about them and lose interest.
It’s not hard to like and reply to your followers’ comments and DMs, but it can be time-consuming especially once your account gets a lot of engagement. I higly recommend that you do some of the work at least because you want to know your customers better. Do 20-30 percent of the work and let your VA do the rest.
Setting up Progress
How do you truly know what works best?
Extensive reports will help you uncover useful insights that will contribute to the success of your Instagram campaign. We mentioned Content Strategy earlier but no matter how much you strategize in the beginning, you can’t get every single aspect right the first time.
You gain a lot of valuable knowledge such as the ideal post length, the most engaging aspect of your theme, the best time and day to post, the best post type, and many more through trial and error. And weekly or monthly update reports allow you to adjust and adapt as you go.
Unfortunately, again, tracking and analyzing Instagram campaigns to create accurate reports are tedious and time-consuming. Drafting reports is not a job for a CEO anyway. Luckily, your VA should be more than capable of doing this for you.
Assist in Paid Advertising Campaigns
Most available Instagram VAs are not skilled enough to run your ad campaigns for you. You need another type of specialist for that. However, a virtual assistant can supplement your team by assisting in the running of ads and monitoring of insights.
You may also have someone train your assistant to run ads themselves so you or your team can have more free time to do other things for your business.
Virtual Assistant VS Instagram Bots
Several Instagram VA services emphasize that they employ “real humans” to do the work and do not use bots or automation. This is because a lot of competing services utilize bots to grow the account of their customers. But if that’s the case, how effective are bots in growing your account and should you use them instead?
Absolutely not.
Instagram automation is the use of software that is linked to your Instagram account and performs tasks such as publishing content, following accounts, answering DMs, leaving comments to other posts, etc. Using bots can save you time and remove the grind from the process of growing your followers. But they’re not really worth your time. Here’s why.
Firstly, Instagram prohibits the use of bots and is hell-bent on identifying accounts that use automation tactics. In fact, the platform has banned numerous bot accounts since 2018.
More importantly, it’s not nearly as effective as organic growth. Hubspot conducted a 30-day test on the effectiveness of a bot-run account against an account managed by a human. The results shockingly revealed that the human-managed Instagram account got 3x higher engagement, with 2,000 more likes and 41% more comments.
Considering the high risk and little reward, it’s just not worth it.
5 Best Instagram Virtual Assistant Agencies
To be honest, despite the headline “Best Instagram Virtual Assistant”, I don’t think all companies on this list is suitable for small businesses, especially the leading ones. A lot of services are too expensive that they might offset hurt your profits. I truly believe that there should be more services that serve the Instagram VA niche to make the market more competitive and affordable.
With that being said, you have some great options here. I believe that you will at least find something that would match what you’re looking for. Keep reading.
Virtuale Staffing
Virtuale Staffing is a virtual assistant agency based in the Philippines that offers the most cost-effective and tailor-fit VAs particularly to small businesses and organizations in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia. The company prides itself on being able to offer the best VA-client matching system in the industry. For instance, if you seek an employee to manage your Instagram account, we’d match you with an IG expert that can resonate with your niche and brand, not a general virtual assistant.
The difference between Virtuale and others in this list is that we can actually provide you with either a part-time or full-time staff that can truly be part of your team. Think of us as your partner or extended family.
Our dedicated VAs can not only bring 700 targeted and engaging followers to your account per month, which is more than what other services can do, but also sell your products/services for you on Instagram. No other service can do that.
You can even assign them to do tasks beyond the scope of the platform as long as the staff is happy. Think of our staff as your very own in-house employee but at a fraction of the cost. Note that you only need one part-time Virtuale Instagram VA to manage one business account.
Pricing
| Part-time | Full-time |
| $440-$528 per month | $880-$1056 per month |
Ampfluence
Amplfluence brands itself as a 100% human-powered Instagram growth solution that conducts audience targeting, profile/brand exposure, engagement, etc. on your behalf. The service starts with a consultation with one of their experts. Once they get to know your niche, brand and goals, they will conduct research on your target audience then begin the growth process.
The Ampfluence team measures performance and adjusts their strategy according to the insights they uncover.
Ampfluence appears to be the leading brand in this niche, which makes it relatively more reliable. However, it is also the priciest. I’d recommend you only use this service if you have a separate VA or team to handle content creation. It’s growth and content management costs $999 for 30 posts, which is too expensive for most small businesses.
The platform also offers a no-risk guarantee that conveys that if they don’t meet your goal for the month, or if you’re not satisfied with the service, they will give you a full refund no questions asked.
Pricing
| Growth | Growth x2 | Growth & Content Management |
| $249 per month | $349 per month | $999 per month |
| Avg. 250+ Organic Followers Targeted Audience No Hashtag Research Email Support Standard Reporting | Avg. 500+ Organic Followers Targeted Audience Hashtag Research Priority Support Custom Reporting | Everything in Growth X2 Targeted Audience Hashtag Research Priority Support Custom Reporting 30 Social Media Posts ($279) 30 Social Media Captions ($249) 30 Social Posts Scheduled ($199) Custom Bio Creation ($49) |
eDigital
eDigital is a Sydney-based digital marketing company that has a dedicated team of Instagram growth experts. Its basic package includes 4 images with matching captions and hashtags. It offers three types of Instagram virtual assistants:
- Curator — someone who searches your website and the Internet to find the most relevant images to your Instagram account and publishes them.
- Creator — someone who profesionally designs original images relevant to your Instagram account and publishes them.
- Supporter — someone who only responds to your Instagram account’s DMs, comments, or tagged content.
Pricing
| Basic Package | $295 per week |
Aigrow
Aigrow is a marketing platform that provides a wide array of tools to productively grow your Instagram account. It uses AI-powered software and a team of Instagram growth experts to help your business thrive on the social platform.
The service offers several different packages in the PRO and VIP category. You may choose one that’s right for your goal and budget. All packages also come with a free scheduler and auto-direct messenger.
Aigrow can guarantee you 300-500 followers per month depending on your chosen package.
The service comes with a 1-week free trial. It might be a bit concerning that some users report that the service charged them even when they cancelled before the free trial ended.
Pricing
| Pro-Managed |
| $199 per month (regular) $129 per month (3-month plan) $99 per month (yearly plan) |
| 300+ New Followers/Month Dedicated Account Manager; 10 hours/month AI-Powered Hashtags, Account, Locations Research Manual Growth Activities – Follows, Unfollows, Liking Unlimited Use of Platform – Scheduler, bio link, post reward Priority 24×7 Support Safe & Secure |
Alliance Recruitment Agency
Alliance Recruitment Agency is a recruitment company that has a network of global teams that aim to recruit people from various industries. It has a dedicated page for Instagram virtual assistants that can help grow your followers.
Some of the tasks its assistants can do include empowering you to choose the right hashtags, liking specific posts and hashtags, following/unfollowing people who post specific hashtags, curate content from specific hashtags, and more.
The agency boasts 24/7 availability.
Get a quote from Recruitment Alliance Agency
I’m new, can you help me decide?
Yes, of course! That’s what we’re here for. The right Instagram virtual assistant largely depends on what stage you are in your business/branding and what your goals are.
- If you’re a solopreneur/influencer with a limited budget and only want to grow your followers and nothing else, go with Aigrow, it has a great reputation and is the cheapest.
- If you’re a solopreneur/influencer with a limited budget and want someone reliable to manage your Instagram account as you run your business, go with Virtuale Staffing. All the other options only assist you in terms of follower growth but managing an account requires more.
- If you have an established business and a team of your own that manages Instagram and only want to grow your followers and nothing else, go with Ampfluence. As overpriced as it is, the Ampfluence team is leading the industry and no doubt has some of the top Instagram organic growth experts.
- If you have an established business but want to expand to Instagram but your account is new, go with Virtuale Staffing. There is nothing like having an Instagram expert in your team to help with everything. Growth is just a means to an end. You need to take advantage of your reach. Only a dedicated VA, which Virtuale provides, can do that for you.