Follow Friday has been part of  Twitter for as long as I can remember and with the use of the hashtag #Followfriday it enables people to find new people to follow, based on your recommendations.

I actually don’t see the point in listing pages and pages of user names as it gives me no incentive at all to follow someone, so I always try to write something about the person and why other people should follow them too.

So if you are on Twitter and fancy chatting to some new people this week my #Followfridays recommendations go to:

@Seanmkent for being lovely, local and fun to chat with.

@Sean110 for being from Essex therefore making him brilliant!

@enjoynorwich for being one of my local tweeters and for our tweet meets

@charlyolivia for being super sweet to chat to.

@YourfirstPA for always making me laugh

@mstevenson83 for the photo, cats and football chat

@Reynardcity for his wacky, cool comic capers

@Lanie_Land for being another local tweeter & having wicked false eyelashes!

@primaryandy great fun, forces related & always replies!

@chrisdpope – funny, honest & trying to stay one step ahead of the chocolate demons!

@MJABradbury for being generally lovely to chat to.

@YMS_Norwich for being another great Norfolk business

@RadioChickBFG – For the forces, radio & fun chats!

@Karen_McNab for her neighbour from hell stories and for being super friendly

The first person was a small locally based businesses owner that didn’t want to outsource their calls to another company that has 50 staff in a call centre sitting there purely to take messages all day. He wanted to have a small personal company that only looked after the needs of a few clients and knew the story behind the business, whilst treating callers like they were their own. The last thing he wanted was to transfer his calls to another company and then have his clients complaining that is sounded like they were dialling a call centre.

He wanted to find someone who only looked after the needs of a handful of people, would be prepared to get to know his clients and his diary and would most importantly be civil and personable to all of his callers – good job he found us then.

On the complete other end of the spectrum I had a lady call to say that she had come across our earlier blog regarding the charity advertising scams and was being harassed daily by people wasting her time trying to sell her advertising space or marketing.  She didn’t mind if we were a call centre, nor did she mind how many staff we had just so long as her calls were answered professionally and we only contacted her with messages from client’s or people wanting to talk to her about her product.

I advised her we could certainly help her out and both of them have agreed to trial our service for a week to see if it helps free up some time for them to concentrate on the more important aspects of running a business.

At YourAdmin we pride ourselves on taking the time to speak to each of your clients like they were our own and our current clients report back that we are friendly, well informed and professional.

If you would like to try out our service please contact us to see how we can help you. We are happy to simply take your calls for a few hours a day or offer you a complete call answering service with diary management and text service, 7 hours a day, 5 days a week. Our lines are manned from 8.00am until 6.00pm and we can even offer a weekend service too if required.

Going on the statistic that 70% of callers will hang up if they get through to an answer phone – can you really afford not to have a call answering service helping you out?

Karen Plane is the owner of YourAdmin a VA firm in Norwich, Norfolk, UK. She started her company after becoming disenchanted by the insecurity of temping and contracting.  She also mentioned in her interview with OneMoreMove.co.uk that with her husband in the RAF, she needed a career that she can move with as the situation arises.  Being virtual provides that freedom.  And being her own boss is just icing on the cake!  I asked Karen some questions and here is what she said.

Why do you continue to be a VA?

I loved the freedom, the drive, the client’s, the fact that I am my own boss and I choose who I work with.

How did you choose your company name?

I wanted something snappy and easy to remember and I think YourAdmin has that.

Do you have a niche? Do you provide any unique services?

I am not so sure it is a niche anymore, but I can offer web design, Social Media and SEO as well as the standard VA and Secretarial services too.

What do your clients and colleagues tell you they admire in you?

My can do attitude, my honesty and my professionalism.

How do you stay organized?  Do you have any organization tips?

Always have a tidy desk, use your diary all the time, don’t write things on scraps of paper and don’t allow your husband in your office at any time!!!!

How would your friends describe you?

Bubbly, funny, loyal, trustworthy and a little crazy.

How do you feel about social media?

I love Social Media and think it is a key part of networking, meeting new clients and selling your product to people that aren’t sure of what a VA does.

Do you offer your clients different levels of social media services?

Yes as some do not require a full package. Some may only need accounts to be set up, some require daily updates, some require a few hours a day of updates.

Do you subcontract to other VAs?

I don’t subcontract, but I work with a number of associates at the VASG, Virtual Assistant Support Group in the UK and we help each other out with work and clients sometimes.

Network Box also found that Facebook consumes a significant portion of business bandwidth: 4.5% of all bandwidth. However, YouTube reigns supreme in that department, accounting for 10% of all business bandwidth used. An accompanying survey showed that 43% respondents are concerned about this seemingly excessive use of social media in the workplace.

Facebook certainly appears to dominate business users’ attention while at work so are you really happy paying for employees to be looking at Facebook?

If previous findings that Facebook is the fourth largest destination site for news are accurate, then perhaps we can safely assume that in-office use of Facebook is for more than just social networking.

Top five websites visited by businesses:

• 1. Facebook – 6.8 per cent of all traffic
• 2. Google – 3.4 per cent of all traffic
• 3. Yimg (Yahoo!’s image server) – 2.8 per cent of all traffic
• 4. Yahoo – 2.4 per cent of all traffic
• 5. Doubleclick – 1.7 per cent of all traffic

It started out quite badly with our Christmas/New Year’s period spent in hospital looking after sick relatives and while I was at the hospital I ironically managed to slip on some grapes that someone had very kindly left on the floor and ended up being taken all the way downstairs to A&E (in a wheelchair)

This pretty much rendered me useless for the first two weeks of 2010, but thank goodness for the ‘helpers’ I had and the people that took care of the office for me. This came at the same time as me being introduced to the Virtual Assistant Support Group (find us on Twitter under #VASG) and It occurred to me that had I have known about the group sooner, I could have given my helpers the night off and called on these ladies to help me out instead.

The group is based on the ethos of “collaboration not competition” and with over 65 Virtual Assistant’s from all over the UK in the group, there is a huge range of skills, help and knowledge available. All of us have experience and qualifications to ensure that if we are too busy to complete a piece of work, there will always be someone in the group we can ask for help.

My family and friends often ask me if I get bored working ‘virtually’ or if I feel like I am going mad stuck in the office all day but the answer has and always will be no.

I love being my own boss, I love having my own client set, I love to be in control of the work I do and I love the fact that the only wicked old boss that grumbles every time you head for the kettle is now me I also love to be able to work flexible hours and not the 9 – 5 that used to drive me insane!

The flexibility and easiness or being your own boss can be passed on to the clients too so everyone benefits in the end. Of course, now I have the ladies of the VASG group to talk to my day is certainly a lot easier and more fun.

Another thing that makes me happy is being in charge of the service suppliers we use and using the ‘We buy local’ group to which I belong in Norfolk, makes this easier for me to meet local business owners and work with people who have the same business values as me.

Of course, there are always going to be unscrupulous people in the world of business and as I have found out this week, some more so than others, but luckily I can dispose of the services of these people and move on to work with people that want to play nicely. For the ones that don’t – good luck to you.

With a new client on board this week and another one in the pipeline it seems the credit crunch is disappearing, but as we are actually here to save business owners money it would make sense that people are switching to working with VA’s and away from the costly recruitment agencies and full time employees.

We are still also working on our Events Management website and as soon as this is up and running we will let you all know so you can see exactly what YourEventsManagement will be able to offer you, over and above what we already do.

Let’s hope March and April continue to get better and better too.

• We had our accounts cleared out by some lovely fraudsters

• We had 4 disputes ongoing with Royal Mail over lost ‘signed for’ packages and after 7 weeks of arguing and filling in forms, we got the money back, but, ironically, 2 of the original cheques sent to us as a refund got ‘lost in the post’. Royal Mail loses Mail. Brilliant.

• We have another 2 new claims to now file with Royal Mail as in the last 3 weeks they have managed to ‘lose’ another 2 of our signed for parcels that we sent out to clients.

• We pulled an all-nighter completing an urgent piece of work for a client that called in last minute – but after 1.5 hours sleep between 2 of us, we made it through the night and got it completed. Well done us!

• We signed up new repeat clients which is always great news and are of course, always welcomed.

• We spent time working for clients in London and Essex, planning events and managing them, which was a lovely break from the office and was great to get out there and meet prospective clients, suppliers and people. And of course the events were a hit, had raving reviews and gained us more repeat custom for 2010. Yay!

• We saw our SEO stats increase since the launch of our new website and branding and now rank one of the highest on Google for Virtual PA’s.

• We had our busiest month of the year so far… and loved every minute of it!!

Lets hope December is just as fun and crazy and we have an even busier month yet…..