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?

Supporting local Norfolk business

YourAdmin has been an accredited member of Buy Local in Norfolk for over a year now and since moving to Norfolk I have learnt that there is a strong sense of community spirit and willingness to help each other out.

Supporting local businesses has always been something we feel is important and we would much rather pop down to the local farm shop  to go and buy our produce, than the big impersonal chain stores (mention no names!), so we felt joining the group and helping to raise awareness of it would do that little extra to helping the local farmer stay in business.

Since getting to know members of the group and the staff who do a great job running Buy Local as well as having regular day jobs, I thought it was only fair to volunteer our services to them too, so after a few weeks of talking to ‘the management’ and working out some options, YourAdmin is now the new Membership Administrator of Buy Local and very proud to be so too.

We have also recently set up a LinkedIn group for all members and local businesses to join so if you want to find out more about us, come join us. We are also on Twitter and wherever you see the hash tag #BuyLocalNorfolk it will probably be from one of the current members.

About the Scheme

Buy local is a social enterprise offering a unique accreditation process for genuinely local Norfolk businesses. With exciting business events, networking opportunities and forums in which to find local suppliers, this website is a resource for you if:

• you are looking for local Norfolk products or services
• you are a local business, interested in applying for buy local accreditation
• you want to support the local economy by finding local businesses as suppliers or for tenders
• you are a buy local member and would like to find out about member offers, networking and Norfolk events and opportunities
• buy local provides a unique accreditation process for genuinely local businesses in Norfolk.
• With a growing network of member businesses, the buy local logo has become a recognisable mark throughout Norfolk.
• Our members also benefit from members directories, both as an online searchable directory and a hard-copy book circulated each year, as well as business and networking events.

I feel I should point out here that before tonight I was actually a webinar virgin so I am glad ‘my first’ experience of it was with Sally.

Although I already use WordPress to post my blogs and love using it due to ease of use and the fact that it is linked to my website…I am dreadfully lazy with blogging and since I have been running for over a year now, I am ashamed to say I have only blogged a handful of times.

Most of the time it is due to not knowing what to write or which topic to blog about, but thanks to Sally, I now have some more ideas and ways to come up with interesting topics… so I promise to spend more time blogging from now on.

Back to the loaf of bread though…the challenge was that we all write a blog by tomorrow and make the heading ‘today I brought a loaf of bread from Sainsburys … so there we go… challenge met!

If you want to take a look at the other blogs resulting from Sally’s challenge tonight then look up the hashtag #loaf on Twitter and you should find us all. I look forward to the next Webinar from @SallyWalker too.

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.

Because competition is so fierce, landing consistent new clients isn’t just about talent. It relies heavily on who you know, and how well connected you are.

Social media can expand your freelance network no end and yield opportunities that you’d never find elsewhere. But just like building up your client list, it takes investment, hard work, and time.

Social networks can be useful in different ways. On one hand, they are a marketing platform where you can share and promote your work. On the other, they serve as rich community resources for freelancers. Once you’ve built and cultivated your network, a simple tweet or update can yield valuable wisdom and connections.

Social media , unlike traditional marketing methods, have benefits that outweigh the risks if you use the services wisely.The most obvious benefits are increased customer loyalty and engagement, your business will gain exposure not just through your own advertisements, but through past clients and friends gained whilst using the services.

Take Twitter for instance. Since joining Twitter 15 months ago we have made invaluable friendship and connections with local people and businesses, we have found out about services and companies we didn’t know existed, we have learnt about news articles before they have reached the tv and we have gained clients that are still with us now.

The most common advice we received from people using social media was to use it to engage your customers in conversation, not just sell your services, offer information and advice to people if asked,  tell people about the services you can offer, but don’t hard sell. The quickest way to lose followers has to be the automated tweets going out once an hour with the same old message. Where’s the personality and involvement in that?

From monitoring our Google Analytics recently, 46% of our traffic actually reaches our website via Social Media. The two biggest referrers are Twitter and Facebook. We think those figures speak for themselves.

If you run a business and want to invest more time in social media, talk to us about how we can help. From the smallest thing such as designing your Twitter background to managing your entire social media accounts on your behalf, there are a number of ways we can help you.

Updated Spring 2010

Spring 2010

January 2010

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

With Analytics you can do a number of things such as:

• Run custom reports
• Set up regular alerts
• Look at visitor trending & loyalty
• check out your most visited pages
• Monitor traffic sources
• See which ‘other’ sites refer the most traffic to your site
• Monitor your Adword campaigns
  
• Look at your top content & pages
  
  

and so much more….

Contact us to find out how we can help you use Google Analytics to learn which online marketing initiatives are cost effective and see how visitors actually interact with your site as well as helping you make informed site design improvements, drive targeted traffic, and increase your conversions and profits.

To find out more about using this tool – read all about it here: Google Analytics – more info

This is due to the problem of role remits, lack of training, work overload, lack of time, higher demands made on workers, redundancy and staff cutbacks.

This is why there are so many important reasons to outsource work.

One of the most important reason to outsource work is that freelance/virtual workers can charge less an hour than a temporary employee as we have no agency fees or commission rates to compete with plus the company also saves a lot of money by not having to pay for training, benefits, equipment, sick-leave etc.

Here is a list of many reasons why outsourcing work is a good thing:

• It allows the company more time to increase customer satisfaction.
• The company can save time and money on advertising for new staff
  
• It can lower training costs
  
• There are no sick, holiday or legal expenses to worry about.
  
• The company can cut back on HR staff.
• It helps to establish new business relationships.
• It saves time and frees up resources.
• It reduced overall operation costs

One crucial element to consider in the current climate is how much money you and your business could save by outsourcing work. We carried out an experiment recently and worked out that by using a Virtual Assistant such as ourselves to outsource work to, we could save you nearly £16,000 in one year.

Click here to see how you could do this…

The outsourced work is always completed perfectly and in a timely manner just as long as the company outsources to qualified providers, it’s a win-win situation. While there are service providers out there who are not experienced or qualified, the company can strike gold if they choose qualified professionals such as YourAdmin.