What's the point of Twitter

We all know that Twitter’s popularity has grown enormously over the last year. Everyone seems to be on it. “I don’t get it – what’s the point?” – our customers ask us. Well, from a business perspective, there are two very good reasons why you would use Twitter – to get more traffic to your website and to find the right people.

The reason why it’s so difficult for our customers to understand why Twitter is so popular is because our customers do not have the time to deal with it. Twitter requires effort, time and consistent maintenance, that is why many companies might need to use personal assistance services to look after their Twitter profile. To the naked eye it looks like a large amount of unrelated, useless chatter with quite a lot of promotion, that, frankly you don’t need. However, if you will look more closely, you will see that after about a month at least 30% of your traffic will come from Twitter. Furthermore, most of those will actually be customers, not just people who are casually browsing.

But how can that be, considering that people who chat on it look like the type of people who have too much time on their hands (and hence probably have no real spending power). Well, that’s the interesting part of the Twitter world. Twitter is a 21st century answer to traditional “buzz marketing”. If you want the news to spread – you need to be on Twitter – because, guess what? That’s where the journalists, researchers and PR get their news from. However, there is one catch: the content needs to be good. The beauty about Twitter is that if you are not a good Twitterer – no one will be reading your profile. You might have followers, but the buzz marketing effect will not take place.

I have been on Twitter since March 2009, and own around 20 profiles. The reason is simple – each profile reflects my audience. Hence, this allows me to message information that is relevant and therefore the traffic I get is very high. Furthermore, I do not work very hard at getting followers – they all come to me, as people keep recommending their friends to follow my profiles. My work is in providing the content that will be of interest in just 140 characters. For example, look at the following profile: http://twitter.com/portnik I use this for Virtual Blue Bird. However, most of my content are jokes, why? Because that’s what time-expensive individuals will actually read if they come to Twitter and want to take a break from their busy lives. My other profiles have completely different content.

Give us a call and I will be happy to put a strategy together for you on how to use Twitter effectively for your business. Our virtual assistants can do all of the maintenance for you (including the design of your profile background).

Kind regards,

Anya Portnik

How to delegate?

The formula is very simple: if your customer pays you £100 to do a project and your Virtual Assistant can complete it for £40, then you are making £60 profit simply because you have a good relationship with your customer. However, as we all know, making the theory work in practice is a lot harder than it seems. Or is it?

Almost all of our customers know that they cannot cope with the amount of work that needs to be done and that they simply must delegate their work. But how do you delegate something that only you can do? Furthermore, what if something goes wrong? At the end of the day, it is your business and you are fully responsible for the consequences. And where do you start? – won’t you need to explain the whole thing to your Virtual Assistants before they can even start to comprehend what you are trying to achieve?

I get asked these questions a lot, especially by those customers who have never used a Virtual Assistance service before. To answer this, I will explain how you should delegate. But first, a few truths…

Truth 1

There is absolutely no way that we will be able to duplicate you – only you know where your business is going and all of the details that surround it. However, what we can do is help you with the tasks that will free up your time, so that you can concentrate on the work that you should be concentrating on.

Truth 2

Your business is unique. Your relationships, approach and thinking are also unique. However, the list of tasks that take up your valuable time and stop you from spending it on more important aspects of your business is not unique. We work with a large number of customers from very different fields, all with very different backgrounds, personalities, approaches, thinking, ideas and strategies – and yet, the tasks that we are assisting them with are very similar. This is not because we are limiting our services, but because there is only so much that a business can delegate. We undertake these time consuming tasks, including administrative support, leaving you to concentrate on more important aspects of your business.

Truth 3

There is always a “Catch 22” scenario when customers start to delegate tasks. On the one hand, you will need to test that your Virtual Assistant is capable of doing the job and not going to cause you problems. On the other hand, if you give out too much information there is a higher risk that something might go wrong (if it works out that your VA is not capable). So, how do you get the best balance? You can do this by testing us. Our VAs can perform a small number of tasks and you can judge our performance. Only then will you see the true benefit of a VA.

Step by step plan

1. Outline the tasks that we can do for you
2. Give Virtual Blue Bird a call and let me know what’s on your list
3. We then work together to prioritise the tasks to your requirements.
4. We will complete those tasks for you in the timeframes you have set for us.
5. You review the results and decide if you would like to allocate the Virtual Blue Bird VAs with more responsibility.

If you have trouble putting this list together (for example you have never delegated work before), call me and I will be happy to help you compile this.


Kind regards,

Anya Portnik

Introduction

This blog is dedicated to both our existing and new customers. The reason why we are starting this blog is to answer the most common questions that we receive on a daily basis and also to help our new customers to understand not only what we do, but also how we can help them.

Who are our customers? The majority of our customers are SMEs. For them, we do a large range of tasks and in most cases they are very customer specific. We also have a few very large clients such as a high street bank; celebrities and a number of CEOs of large organisations.

Our clientele primarily comes from the UK; however, we also work with entrepreneurs in Dubai, Hong Kong, Australia and the USA.

If you want to ask us a question or just have a chat, get in touch – we are always happy to hear from you.


Kind regards,

Virtual Blue Bird team