Social Media Consultancy London

Things To Consider When Setting Up Your Small Business

Setting up your own business is a great way to take control of your career and independence and get out of the rat race than can bring you down. When you’re your own boss, you make all of the decisions, which is great in many ways but it means that the buck stops with you if something goes wrong. To set up your own business, you’ll need to make sure it’s 100% the right decision for you, so consider the following to help you work out if setting up your own business is the right move for you.

Is your business your passion project?

Setting up a business is no easy feat, and if things start to go wrong, or you start running into difficulties, will you be able to retain the enthusiasm to keep you going? Most people who set up their own businesses do so because they’re passionate about what they do, but if your heart is only half in it, or you’re simply bored and looking for a change in direction, you could find your business failing because you don’t have the drive to see it through.

How will you get started?

Do you have any ideas for how you’re going to get your business off the ground? How can you begin and how will you gather the funds to get it started. Do you have savings or someone willing to invest? Have you explored all avenues such as http://www.sage.co.uk/business-advice for advice on launching your startup? There’s a lot of research to be undertaken before you get started, so you must be prepared to put in a lot of hard work before you even get started on planning.

How will you manage money?

How will you manage money coming in and going out of your business? Could you survive if someone doesn’t pay an invoice on time? Getting a tight grip on your business’ finances is important from the outset, and you may wish to try spot cash loans or factoring as explained here: http://www.interstatecapital.com/spot-cash-loans-vs-factoring/, to help you manage your business’ cash flow. You’ll need to make sure that you have contingencies in place as well as some savings in case you are faced with unexpected business costs.

Will you need additional staff?

Can your business operate with just you or will you need additional staff? Can you afford to pay salaries when you first set up your business? It may be that you can’t afford to hire more people at the beginning and could look at hiring freelancers instead to do work as an when is needed (more info available here: http://www.business-opportunities.biz/2014/02/17/freelance-vs-in-house-which-should-you-hire/). When you start a business, and other people are involved, you need to be sensitive to the fact that they have homes, families, etc. to pay for and support and you’ll need to make sure that you can pay them before you start your business.

Once you get your business started, make sure you tell people about it. Social media packages from marketing professionals can take care of the hard work of running your social media accounts to help raise awareness of your business and its services. This leaves you to focus on running your business and making it a success.

4 Small Business Twitter Tips To Boost Engagement!

Whether it’s a product or service, I’ve found that Twitter has been a great all rounder when it comes to boosting my clients brand presence, PR and connecting to potential partners.

Facebook and Instagram have their place of course, but I find that instagram can take a good few months to build a decent length feed to add credibility to your brand whereas with Twitter, you can start retweeting content from influencers in your field immediately and connecting to your audience.

So Here Are The Top 4 Twitter Tips I Use For My Clients Small Businesses

Use A Profile Picture – Unfortunately, it is believed there are as many as 48 MILLION fake Twitter accounts! As a small business starting out on Twitter, I found my clients received MUCH more engagement and follows when we switched their profile photo of their company logo over to a profile picture of the actual founder. We still had their cover photo with the necessary branding, services and contact details, but people responded better to an actual person, especially when we only had 100 followers to start with!

Use Trending Hashtags ONLY If They Are In Your Niche – Unless it’s a motivational Monday tweet, avoid using trending hashtags that have NOTHING to do with your market. After all, you may get extra views, but what is the point if these viwers are not your target market? It looks spammy and can also cause a backlash. After all, who can forget habitats 2009 tweet that used the #MOUSAVI hashtag, taking advantage of what was going on in Iran at the time.

Retweet Brands That You Wish To Promote You, NOT Just Because It’s A Good Article – Ok this sounds fairly obvious but I actually have two separate twitter lists on my Hootsuite feed. One is for the sole purpose of sharing content relevant to my niche, the other is certain brands I wish to work with and retweet just for the possibility of them also retweeting my tweet to their audience base, my potential clients. I see one list as a way to connect to other bloggers in my field, and the other purely as a sales tool. Another tip is to use Tweetchup to research your competitors and see who they are retweeting the most. all potential partnerships and customers you can engage with.

You don’t HAVE to use hashtags in your bio – Did you know that every key word in your bio is searchable on Twitter? There for, you do NOT need to overload your bio with relevant hashtags that fit your business. It takes away from the client message you wish to get across and it can look spammy.

So there are 4 simple yet effective tips that have really started to drive engagement and interest to all my clients Twitter profiles.

Are you looking for Twitter management solutions for your small business? Check out my social media packages!

Speed Up Your Website

If you run a business, there’s no doubt about it – you need a website Not only that, but your website needs to be fast.

Internet connections are faster than ever before, and this means that users will not be happy to wait around for a website to load due to failures at your end. Slow websites will also be penalized by Google making it harder for customers to find your site in the first place. So, yes, speed really does matter, and it should be a priority for you if you’re serious about marketing and selling online.

To help you speed up your website, here are some tips:

Hire the Right Staff

The best thing you can do to ensure that your website stays up and running and up to speed is to hire a good network support services team, who have their eye on the ball and know exactly what is required to make your website and your network fast, simple and convenient to use. If you outsource, this should not set you back too much, and it will be worth every penny to have a reliable site up and running.

Size Images

Images take up a lot of space, and they can take a lot of time to load if they’re too big, which is why you should be using a content management system for uploading content to your website, and why you should be using it to adjust the sizes of your images, so that they don’t slow your website down.

Ditch Unneeded Plugins

There are so many free plugins that promise to make your website bigger and better, that it’s easy to get tempted into using them all, but the more plugins you have, the more sluggish your website will be. So, stick to the essentials if you want to see your speed increase.

Update Your Scripts

Many scripts that are commonly used by businesses need to be regularly updated. Sadly, many business owners are not aware of this, and they don’t make the necessary changes. This causes their websites to slow down, and they lose a not insignificant amount of business as a result. If you don’t want this to happen to you, check and update your scripts as soon as a new version becomes available.

Use Content Delivery Networks

Content Delivery Networks are huge networks of servers that are located all over the world. If you use them, your website’s visitors do not have to rely on coming through your web host’s central server, which will be a lot slower than CDN’s and which are much less likely to crash at an inopportune moment, because they enable visitors to access cached versions of the site from their closest web host.

Have CSS Files at the Top and Javascript at the Bottom of Pages

If you do this your website’s code will be a lot neater and this will ensure that pages load more quickly, crash less often and always look as intended. This is perhaps the best thing you can do to give your visitors a pleasant and efficient experience when visiting your site.