by Angela Taffs | Jan 16, 2015 | Sales and Marketing
What everybody ought to know about using a personal page for promoting their business on Facebook
Are you still using your personal Facebook page for promoting your business? If you are, stop right now!
Facebook may remove it
I see so many of these so just have to share some words of warning about using your personal page for business use. Facebook frowns upon using a personal profile for business use and I have known a few people who have had their pages removed for doing this. They had built up a significant following but had their business name on the page rather than just their own name which got flagged up to the powers that be at Facebook ivory towers. I only know of one lady who had a polite warning and told to change it but I know of two others whose pages just disappeared! All their Facebook contacts gone and nothing they could do about it.
Keep your personal and business life separate
Aside from this, you really want to try and keep your personal and business persona’s separate. You may have just started up a small business which you promoted to your inner circle of family and friends but as your business grows you will want to widen this audience. Do you really want strangers seeing photos of you on a night out? Is this giving a professional image to your business? And even if you don’t have the tendency to go out on a Saturday night and roll around the floor drunk, are you comfortable with potential clients seeing your innermost personal conversations with friends and family? And again, even if you don’t post much personal information on your page, you have no control over what your darling friends may post on your wall that has the danger of causing embarrassment.
You will lose potential followers
Another significant problem with using a personal page is that people who don’t know you can’t ‘follow’ or ‘like’ you as a business. They have to add you as a friend which then in turn allows you to see all of their personal information on their Facebook page. People who don’t know you are unlikely to be comfortable doing this and you will miss out on an opportunity to connect with people outside of your circle of friends.
If you are using a personal page to market your business on Facebook, go change it now and invite your friends across to like it. Even easier than that, Facebook has made it easier to migrate your personal page to a business page if you wish and they have an easy to follow guide here.
And once you have your new Facebook page set up, pop over to The Small Business Kit and share it for others to see.
*If you would like to know more in depth detail about Facebook marketing and how to make it work for your business visit The Small Business Kit and become a member today, all for less than your weekly vanilla latte!
by Angela Taffs | Jan 10, 2015 | Personal and Lifestyle, Starting a Business
Finding your passion
Why finding your passion is so important in business
So today I met a lady who I have been advising on her business.
Whilst I would never tell anybody that their business is doomed to failure, I will also never sugarcoat a situation for someone where I do not see a successful future.
We sat down and went through some cold hard facts. The lack of clients and sales was one but the more pressing concern for me was that when she discussed her business with me, there was something lacking in her voice. She had no passion.
I truly believe that to succeed in anything, whether business or life itself, in order to give yourself the best chance of success, you need to be passionate about what you are doing. If the thought of getting out of bed and going through the motions of what you need to do fills you with dread, you are never going to fulfil your potential.
So we stopped talking about business. I went off tangent and asked her to tell me what she enjoyed doing in day-to-day life. What were her hobbies? What did she look forward to? What did she get excited about? What did she enjoy in her childhood?
The difference in her face and speech was incredible. When talking about what she enjoyed her face lit up and her body became more animated. She became alive.
After a while and with some thought, we found a way of bringing her passion into her business. We could adapt what her business was currently offering and go in a slightly different direction without losing the main ethos of what her business was about.
We brought hope and excitement back into her business and I am sure that with some more planning and dedicated work she will now start to see her clients increase and her income get to where she wants it.
It is not guaranteed that this will work with everyone and with every type of business but sometimes sitting down and going back to basics can be so worthwhile. And the basics of a small business are you – the business owner. Ultimately you are the business.
So if you feel stuck in a rut and would like some help to bring the passion back into what you are doing, give me a call. I don’t make any guarantees but I strongly suspect that some new ideas for your future may come to light.
You may just discover that finding your passion for what you do isn’t that hard after all.
by Angela Taffs | Jan 8, 2015 | Business Success, Personal and Lifestyle
The right way to setting and achieving your goals
Every so often we need to take a step back to reflect on our business and plan new goals for moving to the future.
When reflecting on the past, please remember to not focus on what you haven’t done but be proud of all the things you have achieved. You want to start planning your new goals with positivity and motivation, not feeling down and deflated.
People set their goals differently, depending on their current situation, resources, physical capacity and other factors. You can, however, follow some guidelines to make sure that your goals are credible and possible.
When setting new goals, remember a few basics:
Setting and achieving goals
Be Specific.
General descriptions usually do not have boundaries, so you always leave room for mistakes and compromise. If you want results that you can be proud of, be specific. Include amounts, dates and everything else needed to train your mind to start working towards that goal.
Be Measurable.
Goals need to be measurable so that you can gauge how well you are doing and know when you have achieved them. Include measurable details such as the number of hours you want to work, the amount you want to earn etc.
Be Attainable and Realistic
Whilst it is great to have dreams and high ambitions, only set them if you truly believe you can achieve them. Particularly with short-term goals, if in your heart you believe they are too high to reach, your enthusiasm for trying to attain them will be dampened. Set objectives you truly believe you can reach within a given amount of time with the resources and capabilities you have. Setting a goal to double your income overnight is unrealistic, but setting the goal to achieve this over 12 months may be achievable.
Be Time-Bound
Set deadlines to achieve your goals or else you’re never going to finish anything. Stay specific when setting timelines and schedules. For example, indicate things like “To achieve 1000 subscribers to my mailing list by 30th April 2016. Setting the exact time and date will spur you to start working on your goals, instead of putting it off for another available time. Some goals can take years to accomplish so it is wiser to break these down into smaller objectives, still complete with deadlines. You can finish everything in a sequence to finally reach the biggest one.
Follow this method for setting goals and achieving them. Whatever goals you set, I wish you all the very best and do let me know what your goals are in the comments below.
by Angela Taffs | Jan 8, 2015 | Sales and Marketing
How just two minutes of your time can increase sales revenue
So that time of year is well and truly upon us and the shops are bursting to the seams with shoppers looking to spend their money.
And this is where customer service can make that all important difference to whether shoppers choose your business to part with their hard earned money or whether to take it and spend elsewhere.
Customer service excellence has always been and will always be one of the critical competitive advantages for any business and is a vital element if you want to increase sales.
I was in London last weekend looking to find some purchases for loved ones. I had the money in my purse and wanted to spend. But after going into one particular retailer, who had what I wanted, the customer service experience left me cold. The sales assistant was obviously disinterested in helping me and couldn’t even muster up so much as a smile. Therefore, I decided I would look elsewhere to find the item I wanted.
On the flip side, when I visited House of Fraser on Oxford Street I had no intention of buying anything there. I was there whilst my daughter was looking and at one point, we both stood still looking around us trying to decide which department to visit next. A gentleman stopped and asked if he could help. It immediately became apparent that he was in senior management and had a lady with him holding files, diary and clipboard.
He was so helpful and genuinely cared if we could find what we were looking for, to the point that he turned to the lady with him and told her to go on the meeting and let the others know he would be there shortly. He didn’t just point us to the direction of what my daughter was looking for but took it upon himself to start looking for the particular item and when a salesperson appeared, asked them to carry on helping us.
I have to say that impressed me enough to decide to make some purchases in the store which I had not initially intended to make.
This level of customer service cost the store nothing and took probably no more than two minutes of time, but the payback from the way we were made to feel and the amount we then spent was significant.
So think of those little things you can do to make your customers feel special and valued if you want to increase sales. Let them know you care. Yes, it may take a couple minutes extra of your time but you may just see a significant improvement in your sales revenue and stand out from your competition.
Have you had a good customer experience recently? Share your experience in the comments below.
by Angela Taffs | Jan 8, 2015 | Running a Business
How often do you go on your social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter just to keep scrolling through so much ‘noise’ that you really don’t want to read? Do you find yourself getting irritated and spending too much time looking for something of interest to read? If yes then read on.
It may be time for a social media declutter!
You have probably heard about decluttering your home but how about decluttering your social media?
What is a social media declutter?
Basically, social media decluttering is getting rid of anything that you don’t love or find useful and is taking up valuable space in your news feed. It can be a little time-consuming to start with but once done you will have better focus and spend less time filtering through all the irrelevant content that you no longer wish to see. As a lovely lady in The Success Club put it, it really is no different than decluttering the house before Christmas or spring cleaning the wardrobe ready for summer. You just remove what no longer serves you.
How to do it.
Work through one social media channel at a time and do the following where relevant:
- Go through groups you have joined and delete any that are no longer relevant or don’t offer you any value.
- Go back through your news feed on your business pages and get rid of any items you may have posted that may no longer be relevant to the way your business is now progressing.
- Go through your connections on LinkedIn and Twitter and delete any people that are constantly posting things you are not interested in. I also get rid of Twitter accounts I am following that no longer hold an interest for you.
- If you run any groups where you have members who are constantly negative and are bringing the wrong feeling to the group, delete them. If you want to be truly professional, message them to politely let them know that you don’t feel they are a right fit for the group any more and they would be better finding another group that is better able to help them. Then hit delete.
- Finally, go through your personal page on Facebook and really think how your numerous ‘friends’ make you feel. If there are people there that drain you and you feel your energy level drop just by seeing their name, get rid of them. You don’t have room for these people in your life when you need every ounce of energy to continue to build your business. There are always people that make you feel bad about yourself so remove them from your life. You will feel so much better for it. If however, you really don’t feel up to deleting them, you can just unfollow them so they don’t show up in your feed.
So now you have completed your social media declutter, you should have gotten rid of all the rubbish that takes up your news feed and causes unnecessary distraction and frustration. More time to focus on achieving that next level of success.
