Category: Social media

If you’re a small business owner, then you should know that there’s an important event coming up for your calendar. No, it’s not Christmas – it’s Small Business Saturday!

Every year, on the first Saturday of December, this not-for-profit campaign encourages consumers to support small businesses in their area, whether that’s by visiting independent shops or buying locally online. In 2017, £748 million was spent on Small Business Saturday, so if you want to get involved this year, here’s what you can do.

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LinkedIn SlideShare is “the world’s largest community for sharing presentations and other professional content” online. It has 80 million users and it has been around for a number of years, but it is still only used by 17% of B2B marketers. That’s a huge missed opportunity for businesses looking to promote themselves online.

If you’re a business owner and you want to know more about how SlideShare can help you, look no further! Let us give you the lowdown.

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Managing your business’ social media can be a full-time job. If you want to stay on trend, connect with your audience and post regularly, you could easily spend all day doing it – never mind running your business!

This is where scheduling comes in. Rather than creating posts as you need them, there are apps that will let you schedule your posts ahead of time. This means you can create a batch of posts and release them when the time is right – even during unsociable hours.

To help you get started, here are 4 of the best apps for scheduling social media posts, and some advice about the best times to post your content.

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Get Ahead VA offers a wide range of business and marketing services. In our Service Spotlight we take a closer look at one of these, and show you how our virtual assistants can help you and your business. This month we’re looking at social media management.

What is social media management?

Social media management is a vital part of any modern marketing strategy. It involves engaging with your customers and creating a persona for your brand on social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and so on. You can do this by creating and sharing content, and responding to questions and comments from your audience. (more…)

Blogging for business: many of us feel like it’s something we should be doing, but does it really work?

‘Content marketing’ – the official term for marketing that involves creating and sharing content, like blog posts, with an online audience – is hugely effective. Compared with paid search, for instance, content marketing can produce three times as many leads and cost 62% less. What’s more, blogging has myriad benefits for business owners: it can drive traffic to your website, generate sales and mailing lists, and help you to establish yourself as an authority in your field. When it comes to the question “Should my business have a blog?” the answer is almost always yes.

If you’re new to blogging for business, there are a few golden rules you should follow to make your blog a success. Remember, blogging is hard work, but use these 5 tips and you’re bound to start seeing results.

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LinkedIn is the number one channel for B2B marketers. According to research conducted by the site, 94% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn to distribute their content, and more than 80% of B2B leads created by social media come from LinkedIn. So what does this mean for you? Well, if you’re a business looking to promote your products/services to other businesses, then LinkedIn should be your first stop.

One of the best ways to promote your business using LinkedIn is through the messaging service. It is here that you can connect with other users, share your content and find new leads. There are two versions of LinkedIn messaging: the free version lets you message your contacts on the site, while the paid-for version, InMail, allows you to message people you aren’t already connected with.

So, if you’re a business looking to make connections on LinkedIn, here are some tips for getting the most out of LinkedIn messenger.

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LinkedIn might have been around for a while, but stats published earlier this year show that it is still hugely influential. There are around 500 million users on LinkedIn, 40% of whom use the site daily. Research by the Society for Human Resource Management discovered that, of the employers who use social networking sites for recruitment, more than 90% use LinkedIn.

Even so, it can be tricky to keep your LinkedIn profile up to date, and with so many other tasks demanding your attention it’s all too easy to let your profile languish, out of date and unloved. If this is how your profile is feeling, here are some things you can do to freshen it up, so you can keep making those valuable online connections.

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At Get Ahead VA, we’re always on the lookout for exciting tools that can make running a business just a little bit easier – that’s why, earlier this year, we blogged about some of our favourite apps for business.

Today we’re taking a closer look at one of those apps, Canva. We’ll show you how it can help with all your business’ graphic design needs, and why our VAs love it!

What is Canva?

Canva is a free-to-use graphic design website and app that allows you to create beautifully designed media for both online and offline use. Canva provides it users with thousands of photos, fonts and graphics, as well as lots of handy templates for creating everything from social media posts, to banners and thumbnails, to flyers and leaflets. The program uses a drag-and-drop format, so it’s easy to create your designs. Although Canva is free, you can upgrade to ‘Canva for Work’, which provides access to more features, including extra photos and templates, and makes it easier to save and share designs with other members of your team. (more…)

GDPR is coming – the EU’s new data protection rules will come into force on 25th May, and will affect all businesses dealing with individuals and companies within the EU. If you’re not sure how to handle these new regulations, don’t worry: our ‘30 Days to GDPR’ post has you covered.

But GDPR could also have an impact on the sites you use every day, including that all-important networking platform: LinkedIn. How will businesses that rely on LinkedIn for making connections be affected when GDPR finally comes in?

If you want to know more, here’s the lowdown on LinkedIn and GDPR.

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Spambots have long been a problem for Twitter, and as of 23rd March 2018 the platform introduced new anti-spam rules to try and combat them. The idea behind the new rules is to prevent users from posting multiple Tweets with the intention to “disseminate spam” or to “artificially amplify or inflate [a Tweet’s] prominence”.

The changes are designed to combat duplicate content, so they’re likely to have the most significant impact on social media managers and business owners who post the same content across multiple accounts. Want to know if these new rules will affect you? Read on to find out what steps you can take to avoid your Tweets being marked as spam.

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