An quick interview with Virtually Sorted, a site providing accounting news, information, tips, tools, resources and insight–everything you need to help you prosper and enjoy the accounting profession even more!
How long have you been on Twitter?
Since October 2008.
How many people follow you?
Currently 367.
How many people do you follow?
We were using automatic following software www.twollow.com and had over 400 people we were following but realised this might make us look really spammy, so culled it to around 40.
What made you sign up to Twitter?
It’s very easy to use, can be automated, integrates well with other social media and gives a good insight into what a virtual assistant does and how they do it.
How often do you ‘Tweet’?
Probably once or twice per weekday, although these are mostly scheduled using www.tweetlater.com which we found excellent.
How has Twitter been beneficial to your business?
It’s given people an insight into the range of things we do. For example, we had a follower who had known us for a while but hadn’t realised we do data entry, so he was able to forward some leads to us.
If you had to recommend one person that business people should follow on Twitter, who would it be and why?
Difficult one that – I’d suggest you follow the people you personally find interesting rather than the usual suspects.
Have you had business / leads from Twitter?
See above example of a contact who hadn’t realised the full range of our services.
Can you give a specific example of how Twitter has made a difference to your business?
Twitter is easy to update and integrates well with other applications like Facebook, so we no longer spend hours updating individual social networking sites. From a business perspective, we haven’t had direct business from it yet, but we’ve not actively followed up many of the followers we have.
How do you see your use of Twitter evolving in the future, if at all?
It would be great to get more integration on other networks e.g. LinkedIn, MySpace, blogs etc. so that one central place could update all of these social networks. I foresee people asking for more than 140 characters to explain their most interesting thoughts, so rationally the next step is to integrate some kind of blog linking into the code.
For us personally, we are experimenting with manual submissions and direct contact to increase our conversions from Twitter.
Your Twitter name?
Your website address?
A short description of your website:
Virtual assistant company for UK SMEs specialising in full service admin support.
If you would like to be featured in our Twitter interviews, please answer
the above questions and mail to nikki@nikkipilkington.com, then follow
@nikkipilkington on Twitter
