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You don’t want to get instructions for your projects through private messaging. #vatip 
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Spend less time researching the VA industry and more time being part of your client’s industry. #vatipGotta Tweet!
Webinars give you a chance to prequalify your clients. #vatip Gotta Tweet!
In Words:
Hi. You’re listening to episode number 42. As I was sitting here debating on what to talk about, it’s a week before Christmas. Happy Holidays. Merry Christmas. All that good stuff. New Year’s Eve is a week from today (oops! I meant Christmas Eve).
I’m excited for the opportunity to rest. During the holidays, I mean, I love having my husband home because usually I’m home all day by myself, so having him home is cool. He teaches high school so he’s home for a couple of weeks, so that’s always fun getting to do things with him in the middle of the day when he’s normally working.
Then, just chilling out and not thinking about client work or VA coaching work or anything like that, just really enjoy some downtime. I’m saying it like it’s the whole holiday time, but it might be just one day, like Christmas day or day after Christmas or that Saturday or what have you.
But anytime where I can just really just totally relax my mind is always a good thing. Because most of the time I’m thinking about business and what I could do and, you know, if there’s something I could learn or teach. My mind is always, always going, which is cool.
But anyway, so I’m excited about some gifts that are coming like a new light for my laptop so I can start doing videos. There’s a little setup I’m going to do in my office for special videos. I’m excited about working on my YouTube channel.
I’m curious to know, what are you excited about this holiday season past spending time with family and friends. What special gifts have you asked for that you’re excited to get. So share with me, you know, I like for you to share with me on my Facebook page. Don’t rush now. You’re still in the middle of the podcast. But once it’s done, come hang out with me. Tell me all about it. Let’s just chitchat.
Anyway, today’s topic is not about Christmas and all your gifts. I want to hear about it, though, so come tell me. But I thought about are you friends with your clients on Facebook?
What do you think about being friends with your clients on Facebook?
I got a request and I get several friend requests so friend clients on Facebook and it doesn’t always make sense for us to be friends. If you are managing a community for a client, then you may want to be friends so they can add you to the group or just give them your Facebook email address and they can add you to the Facebook group that way, you know, from your email.
The other thing is that you don’t want to get instructions for your projects through private messaging. A lot of times you’re getting email request from clients or prospective clients because they want to send you private messages and you don’t want that. You don’t want to have to check your email and private messages about projects. You want to be working off of your Facebook business page.
The thought is instead of us being friends on Facebook, my Facebook business page is connected to my personal profile. Simply click on that. Click “like” on the page. Ask your question directly on the page. Messages are actually closed on my Facebook page. I mean, I want to talk to you right there. One-on-one time would be if we’re actually doing a project once we’ve started, and if they’re looking to schedule an appointment, I’ve got a calendar. I do weekly webinars for them to make contact that way.
But there really is no need to be your client’s friend on Facebook.
I don’t know if you’ve got your Facebook reserved for family and friends. I’ve got a mix. I’ve got a mix of family, friends, and acquaintances that I may have met at conferences and different things along the way. I think I’ve got almost 2,000 friends. Now, I’m much more pickier about whose friend request I accept and whose friend request I choose to ignore.
I like my News Feed to be clean and quiet. I only want to hear from people who are providing really good content, whether it’s innovating, motivating, whether it gets me moving, you know, there’s certain things I want to see in my News Feed and I’ve unfollowed everybody except for, like I said, people and pages that are providing engaging content. Engaging could be informational, educational, inspiring, fun, you know, a place where you just want to go hang out, or a mix of both.
But if you saw my News Feed, you would be like, oh my gosh. Yeah, it’s skippy. I took my time. I didn’t sit and unfollow everybody at one time. But I did it, you know, Facebook will only let you unfollow so many people at a time. But I did it and so Facebook was like, you know, they have a captcha they want you to do and stuff like that. I would unfollow up until I got that captcha message and then wait and then do more the next day. So every single day, I was unfollowing, unfollowing, until one day my News Feed was totally empty. There was nothing, nothing in the News Feed. It was great. I let it go like that for about a week just to experience the quiet.
The reason why I did that is because I work on Facebook and you might work on Facebook too. If you’re a community manager for your client, whether it’s in groups or on their Facebook page, you can’t not be on Facebook. So you can’t avoid it and you can’t be on Facebook as your page if you have to work with your client’s stuff on Facebook. You have to be on Facebook as your personal self.
The way to clear up the noise and the clutter, for me, was to unfollow everybody and then I went back and follow people on pages that are providing stuff that I like to see in my feed. It’s been like that for maybe two months. What is it, December? I think I started that in September because I got tired. It was feeling like a disruption to me. So I got it cleaned up and it has been amazing, amazing.
I recommend you try that. Start unfollowing, especially your old friends from high school who you ain’t talked to in a while, old coworkers, stuff like that. You don’t have to unfriend people, but you don’t have to follow their every move. I don’t like that Facebook will tell you, oh, so and so posted on somebody’s page, or so and so changed their profile picture, or so and so changed their cover picture. It’s like, uh, so [Laughs] so what. You have control over your News Feed.
Now, if you’re following me on Facebook, I want you to put me on your high list of pages that you follow and allow in your feed. Good stuff, you want good stuff in your News Feed. But yeah, if you have to be on Facebook every day, which I absolutely love serving my client with that. I have one client where I serve them like in groups and stuff on Facebook and I love it. It’s fun. Since I have to be here every day, I want my work environment to be positive, to be inviting. I don’t want to be like, oh gosh, you know, seeing crazy stuff. You know there’s been some crazy stuff that you see on Facebook and it doesn’t have to be that way. You have control over all of that.
I challenge you to clean up your Facebook if you’ve got time, and if not, make time.
Do a little bit every single day until you get it how you want it. You’ll be amazed at how much time you don’t spend getting lost on Facebook and how much focused time you spend on Facebook once you clean it all up.
Anyway, that’s as much as I have to talk about today. It’s one of those days where I’m not really chatty. Maybe I’m tired. I don’t know, kind of weird. But anyway, that’s my little tip on Facebook and being on Facebook.
I haven’t been on Twitter as much, but Twitter is not noisy to me because I don’t go on Twitter. I need to start doing Twitter. I use Hootsuite for Twitter and that helps having it all organized. Twitter, it’s nowhere near as noisy as Facebook, and I don’t have any notifications that pop up on my phone unless I’m mentioned or someone is tweeting me directly. Not through the private messages, but I mean you mention me in a tweet, then I get that directly. But other than that, Twitter is really quiet in comparison to Facebook and I’m not on it every day. Don’t have to be on Twitter every day like that. I can come and go on Twitter. I need to be searching more on Twitter about what’s going on in the industry and stuff, my client’s industry and do that.
Let me give you this, something else I just thought about by saying that. I would recommend that you spend less time researching the virtual assistant industry and more time being a part of your client’s industry. Get into their world, because when you have to write emails and write sales pages and different content and things like that for your website, if you’re so wrapped up into the virtual assistant world, you forget what your clients talk about. You forget how they speak. I mean, they’re still grasping what a virtual assistant means.
There are a lot of people that really don’t realize that your client is in one state and you’re in another, or your client is in one country and you’re in another. It’s funny to me that they don’t get that because remember like back in 2008 when a lot of companies moved their customer service stuff overseas, and you might call Sprint and you get somebody overseas, or Verizon and stuff. So it’s not a new thing where you’re not in the actual place of the clients that you’re working with. I guess people just haven’t thought about it because they’re not doing it. It’s not on their radar so they don’t even think about the fact that, oh, you’re not in the same place as your client. It’s always funny to me what happens.
I saw something in a search. One virtual assistant, someone sent them an employee application. If someone sends you an employee application, they are not your client. They are looking for what the application says, an employee, and clearly they don’t know what a virtual assistant is. I don’t know if you want the clients that you have to educate on what a virtual assistant is or not. It’s one thing to educate clients on the service that you provide. It’s another thing to educate clients on what being a virtual assistant means.
You have to decide how much do I want my client to know ahead of time before we interact one-on-one.
That’s why I love webinars for virtual assistants because that is the place where you can do both in 45 minutes, really 30 minutes and 15 minutes of Q&A, and have a group without having to do it one-on-one and one-on-one and one-on-one, saying it over and over and over again. You get a chance to prequalify your clients. That is just awesome, awesome.
If you are not adding webinars to your marketing plan for now into the New Year, I really strongly encourage you to do so. It’s going to open up doors for you. Not only will you get to interact with your clients and then sharing with them what you do and stuff, but you’re going to be able to get hands on experience with the actual tools and the whole setup of doing a webinar.
If you are a VA that wants to provide webinar services for clients, you should be doing webinars for yourself.
You may have heard me say this on the podcast before, whatever service you want to provide to your clients, you should be doing that for yourself even if it’s just for you. Like not for other clients, just for you. Do it as a test run. Get a feel for it. Know the ins and outs for it before you put your hands on your client’s stuff. That way you’ve worked out the kinks and all these things.
When I’m trying out new software, I love the ones that give you like a 30 day trial period to really get your hands in there and test it out. Some will do 7 days, some will do 14 days, but we need a trial to see what it’s like and to experience it and get a chance to experience the glitches and hiccups and figure out how things are all connected. That’s how you get better at a particular tool. It might be AWeber or MailChimp or some type of shopping cart or Shopify, or whatever the tool is, the webinar tools, you know, different stuff like that.
Once you get your hands on it and experience and get a picture of what it all does and what it involves, then you’re ready to talk to a client about it and what you can do and how it will work for them. Or the ones that come and they’re already using it, you’ll already know, oh yes, I’ll be able to help you do this, this, this and that, what have you.
That’s the end of episode 42. I said I didn’t have anything, but I’ll always find something to talk with you about. Even when I think I don’t have anything, things come up. I absolutely love doing what I do and that’s coming to this podcast ever week and helping you with your virtual assistant business.
This webcast, I’m sorry, this podcast (webinar is in the brain). This podcast is all about you, the virtual assistant business owner and I want to make sure that I’m serving you to the fullest. When you come over to my Facebook page and you come over and share the gifts that you’re excited to get this Christmas, share with me as well what questions you have about your business. If there’s something you’d like for me to talk about on the podcast, I’d love to hear from you.
Some topics I’m interested in and some not, like paperwork, questions about organizing paperwork. That’s not my deal [Laughs], organizing paperwork. I try to have the least amount of paperwork as possible. I try to do it all on the computer so I have it there. It’s documented. I love pens and journals and notepads and stuff, but as far as paperwork like tax stuff and all that, I leave that to the professionals. I provide them with the information that they need. I keep a spreadsheet throughout the year and update that. Some quarters I’m better at being updated on it. Others I’m not, and I just get caught up and send it to them.
It’s such a relief when you can have a professional doing that for you. Just like how our clients feel it’s such a relief for them to have a professional who can handle things for them, the administrative, the technical, the creative stuff, so they don’t even have to think about it.
Anyway, I’m saying all this to say come hang out with me on my Facebook page and let’s chat. Let’s hang out.
Thanks so much for tuning in. If you like what you heard, stay tuned. We’ll be back. Tell me what’s going on with you. Come on over the Facebook page: facebook.com/tiffanyparsonbiz, or if you prefer a little shorter message, come on over to Twitter: @tiffanydparson.
See you next time.
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