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About the Virtual Assistant industry for VAs and for clients

Category Archives: Twitter

Twitter for Virtual Assistants webinar

If you’ve been wondering whether or not to provide social media services for your clients and where to begin, then this webinar will be very timely for you.

I met Keith Keller at a recent Networking World event and we found a perfect synergy with what he does and what I do.  I’ve been assisting clients with Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter for sometime and am well aware of the challenges clients have with respect to not just understanding how social media can help their businesses, but also how to find time to do it all. Enter the Virtual Assistant.

When Keith was presenting how to use Twitter for business the information he gave excited me – I could see a lot more potential growth for not only my own Twitter account but for that of my clients.  However, when the audience started to call out questions I got even more excited.  You see, we (Virtual Assistants) were the missing link for Keith’s clients.  People were asking if he could help them set up their accounts and how are they supposed to find time to tweet throughout the day or watch what’s being said on Twitter?  I responded with ‘that’s what VAs are for’ and got Keith’s attention.

We had a chat after his session and found that a working relationship would indeed be ideal for Keith and myself.  He can teach people how to use Twitter and we (VAs) can assist them in the daily use of it.

Enter the “Twitter 4 VAs” webinar which takes place on 27th of this month.  So, what are you waiting for?  Why not book now while I have your attention?  Click here for more details.

Twitter 4 VAs

Networking is such a useful thing to do. Less than two weeks ago I attended the 90 Day Networking Event in Melbourne, being held by Networking World. I met quite a few people (there were over 150 in attendance) and have connected with some of them since.

One of these people is Keith Keller, whom I like to nickname “Mr Twitter”. Keith is a Global Social Media Coach who focuses entirely on Twitter. He teaches you how to get the best out of your Twitter experience and runs sessions called Twitter 101, Twitter Kickstart and Twitter Intensive.

He teaches our (the VA industry ‘our’) potential client base how Twitter will benefit them and how to make use of it. What he doesn’t do is set up Twitter accounts and manage it for his clients. That’s were we VAs come in and what a perfect alliance this will be for our industry!

Enter Twitter4VAs.com.

Keith and I have collaborated to bring a 60 minute webinar to VAs teaching them how to get the best out of Twitter, great tools you can use for Twitter and suggestions on how to promote your Twitter services to potential clients. Sound like THE webinar you should attend? Good, I thought so.

This webinar will be held on Thursday 27th October at 10am AEST (Melbourne, Australia time) so that our fellow VAs in the northern hemisphere can also attend (Wed evening). Keith is an enthusiastic bubbly guy who will infect you with his love for Twitter. I found his presentation exciting and his enthusiasm contagious when I attended his session two weeks ago and was surprised to find that he wasn’t promoting VAs to help clients set up and manage their Twitter accounts. That has changed now :-) as you can imagine. I didn’t waste time in introducing myself and explaining what I do fulltime – supporting clients with their admin/secretarial and web based support needs. Keith had heard of Virtual Assistants but hadn’t had much direct contact with them.

So, set the date in your diary and head on over to Twitter4VAs.com to book for the webinar now. You will be so glad you did this!

Virtual Assistant tools you use – Twitter

I am constantly refining the way I do things and researching new and better ways to do things. So I thought I’d open up for discussion here the various tools we use as Virtual Assistants.

Today I want to discuss using Twitter on behalf of clients.  Because I monitor multiple accounts on Twitter I’ve chosen to use Seesmic as it allows me to have several accounts open all at once and I can post/tweet to any one of them or multiples if I want to.  However, the version I’m using seems to struck a limitation, i.e. the last two accounts I’ve added won’t automatically login whenever I open the account – I have to keep entering the passwords.  The first 4 log in fine but the last 2 don’t.

I know there is a new version of Seesmic but I don’t like it and prefer the older 0.8 version.  I don’t know if the new version will manage 6 accounts fine or not.

Do you run multiple Twitter accounts and what do you use to monitor it? Not only that, but why do you like that program?

Using networking tools for VAs

At one of the VA forums I belong to a member asked if someone could explain how a small home transcription business can grow their business using Facebook, Linked-in or Twitter or is it more for the merchant business?

My answer was brief – there’s a lot to cover for each of these tools, but hopefully this will help answer it for others thinking the same thing.

Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter work quite differently but often with similar results.  I’ll try to explain briefly here:

Facebook helps give a ‘face’ to those you connect with, you can create Fan Pages for people to follow what you have to say and if you’re promoting a product, service or event, Facebook is a great way to be able to send out invitations to people to get involved and it’s permission based.  That means they’ve already connected to you so they’ve given you permission to send things to them via Facebook.

LinkedIn is probably the most professional of business networks I’ve seen – more business than ‘social’ although it is often lumped into the social networking category.  Strictly speaking you should only send invitations to people you know personally to join you, but once you’re involved with it you’ll often get invitations from others you don’t know. This is because they’re trying to build up their numbers.  There is a Q&A section there called Answers which is the best place to go – to ask questions and/or to answer them and get people to notice you exist. Their recommendations section is excellent for building up testimonials from peers and clients.

Twitter – Both Facebook and LinkedIn have adopted the small 140 character type set up – what are you doing now? function that works so well for Twitter (although Facebook allows you to have a lot more characters).
Twitter is about following people – anyone who interests you and having people follow you.  There’s no need to know them personally.  It’s a good way to ask questions, get answers and promoted products, services and events.

What is most important and many people forget this.  It’s more important to give than to get.  The more you give of yourself (information, assistance, just for the sake of helping someone) the more others will take an interest in you and what you do.

So with all three, and with any other networking type tool (even this forum for example) it’s important to build relationships and the best way to do that is be involved, be engaged, take notice of other people and when you are able, offer assistance.

Hope this helps.

Kudos to Twitter… and @Telstra!

I had a problem with one of my Telstra accounts. I’d inadvertently made a payment on the wrong account and I didn’t pick it up till after I’d made the same mistake the following month.

I couldn’t figure out why Telstra was saying I was in arrears when my bookkeeping program told me I was all paid up. I logged into my bank account and found the error.

Do you think I could get Telstra to do something about it?  I’d spoken to 3 different consultants over a period of a week and each time got told it would get sorted.  I even emailed them via their website and I got a reply email to confirm the payments had been located.

The last consultant I spoke with was a bit on the arrogant side and she told me they couldn’t do that – shift the payments to the right account.  I got very annoyed and demanded to speak to a supervisor (3 times as the consultant was ignoring my requests on the phone).  Eventually she went away and then came back to say the supervisor was in a meeting but would call me back.  I hung up in disgust and wondered what would have happened if the ‘wrong account’ had turned out to be another person, and not my business account. Would they have still refused to shift the payment to the right account?

So, what does any annoyed person do today when they have social media at their fingertips?  They tweet about it.  And very quickly someone at Telstra picked up on it and contacted me.  The guy got my problem sorted very quickly, followed me up by email and by phone and I’m now happy.  Perhaps I should have tweeted earlier!  Oh, and did the supervisor ring me back?  No but in fairness they have may learned that Twitter and @Telstra were sorting it out for me.