Social networking for VAs

The world of networking is forever being redefined, reshaped and reborn online.  And it’s easy to form opinions about one particular group or another and then change your mind later down the track.

That’s what’s happening for me.  Originally I saw Facebook as a tool for family and friends but not for business, however that is changing a great deal now. There are people like Mari Smith with WhyFacebook? and Jason Alba with I’m on Facebook, now what?, along with many articles about using Facebook for business.  Some of them are:

• Seven Steps to graphing your Facebook strategy,
• How to use Facebook to promote your business and blog,
• and How to use Facebook to grow small business.

Once again, it was at a client’s prompting that I started to look further into this because of coaching she is receiving.  Her coach uses Facebook for connecting all her coaching clients and I believe has a closed ‘forum’ at Facebook.  My client needed me to help her get set up and connected at Facebook.

One of the great things about having a VA is that you can get them to research things for you and set up accounts and profiles for you at the various networks.  Just for the benefit of my readers – I just do the set up and tweaking – my clients do their own networking but I can give them guidance on ways to do that. Which is why it’s important I have some idea of how the networks work in the first place!

I’d originally kept my Facebook profile for family and friends and rarely connected to anyone in business but after about a year of ignoring it I’m now going back to re-explore and have set up a new profile specifically for business. And I’ve discovered you can set up a page – which is different to a profile and there are heaps of applications you can add such as RSS feeds, Twitter feeds and other things.  Yes, you can do this in your profile too but there are apparently different ways of doing things and there appears to be no limitation on the number of ‘fans’ you can have compared to the number of ‘friends’ you can connect to or send invitations to.

If you read my blog at SOHO-Life you’ll notice that I’ve written a lot about Linkedin.com and have recently begun focussing on Yahoogroups.com.    I plan to explore a few networks there as I often get asked about the various ones I participate in.

So, for my business Facebook it’s early days yet and I’m still learning – not everything shows up on my page where I told it to so I have to keep exploring.  I’d love to hear from you if you’re using Facebook for business and how you’ve found it to work for you.  And perhaps any hints or tips you might have for the readers here.

Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoogroups, social networks, virtual assistants, networking for business

Kathie Thomas

Kathie is the former owner of VA Directory and is former past President of the Australian VA Association. She founded the Virtual Assistant industry in Australia in the mid 90s, having already been operating a home-based secretarial service. Today the VA industry covers a multitude of office-based services for clients worldwide.