Jen Stakes Roberts | Resources,Technology
I’m noticing over here on the other side of the Atlantic that the British freelancer community seems less enamoured by Google Plus than their US counterparts. I could speculate for hours why that might be: probably some mix of American enthusiasm for anything new and shiny, British cynicism of bandwagon-leaping, and perhaps just something pessimistic in the water at the moment.
Although Google+ has been getting a lot of buzz in the tech press and recently announced it has amassed 90 million users, it is still seen by many as a social media also-ran, having been unable to break into the public psyche in the same way Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have.
Jen Stakes Roberts | Getting a Job,Training
Whatever your freelance business, whether you provide a service or create your own products, marketing will probably take up a good chunk of your time. You might not have thought of your website, social media time, cold calling or networking as ‘marketing’ but any time you are spending telling people about what you offer, however indirectly, can be set down as marketing.
Smart phones, internet, social media sites, e-mails, tweeting, blogging – we have accepted all of these innovations as part of our working and daily lives – they help us to work more flexibly, stay in touch for longer and respond to each other more quickly. But several surveys and employment tribunal cases this year have shown that employers need to provide clear guidance to staff regarding how they use social networking sites.
Jon Norris | Getting a Job,Technology
Every so often a new invention or technology pops up that fundamentally changes the way people interact. Whether it be the Gutenberg press or Facebook, both have had a profound impact on the way information is shared and how easy it is to access. Along with any new technology also comes a healthy dose of new business opportunities and hype – and the hype comes no bigger than that surrounding social media.
Jon Norris | Lifestyle & Time out,News
This may take you by surprise a bit, given the massive popularity of smartphones amongst today’s savvy professionals. New research has found that smartphones are valued less by freelancers and contractors than social networks, online organisational tools such as Dropbox, and even coffee.
Rachel Soothill | News,Technology
According a new US study, it has been revealed that consumers who follow brands on the popular social network Twitter are much more likely to purchase from that brand or recommend their products to others. The social media marketing study which was carried out by Constant Contact and research firm Chadwick Martin Bailey, analysed the behaviour of 1,491 consumers aged 18 and older.
Rachel Soothill | News,Technology
At the beginning of the week Google announced the launch of its Google+ Pages. Specifically designed for companies, the pages allow them to set up profiles for their brands. There are also a host of business related features that they can benefit from.
One of the hardest things to get your head around when using Twitter is the hash tag. What are they? What do they mean? Where do they come from? A hash tag is simply a way for people to spread information and make it easier for people to search for tweets that have a common topic.
One of the most attractive aspects of freelancing is that despite working from home, working online offers you many opportunities to land projects from clients across the globe. With English serving as the global business language of choice, for the native English speaking freelancer there should be no barriers to attracting a diverse and international clientèle.
Jon Norris | Getting a Job,News
As they do every quarter, outsourcing site Freelancer.com has released their latest figures mapping trends in the demand for freelance workers across sectors. Thousands of jobs are posted up on their site every month, so their data can be a good barometer of the direction of freelance work.
Late last year Prime Minister David Cameron announced his Government would be pumping £400 million into a project to create a Silicon Valley-style “Tech City” in the east end of London, specifically in the area surrounding the Old Street Roundabout.
A new survey from technology market research specialists Radicati.com says the average corporate email user sends and receives around 105 email messages every day and that nearly 20% of these are spam or ‘greymail’ i.e. unwanted newsletters or notifications.
Rachel Soothill | News,Technology
Google’s new attempt at a social network, Google+, launched three weeks ago and already has over 18 million users. Presumably envious of Twitter’s sea of celebrity users, Google+ has now embarked on a mission to ensnare celebrities to help build on its early success.
Selina Murray | Getting a Job,Technology
The last year has seen a rise in UK companies using social networks to win new business, says a new global survey from workplace provider Regus. In 2010 Regus found that 33% of UK firms were successfully winning new customers through social networking activity. A year later, the proportion has risen eight percentage points to 41%.
Jon Norris | Resources,Technology
As Twitter becomes more and more widely used by businesses both large and small, more time and brainpower is being poured into finding out what makes the social service tick, as marketers everywhere try in vain to find out what it takes to make something “go viral” (hint: you can’t). Of course, the secret to success on Twitter lies in the retweet – users passing your message on to their followers.
Although many businesses both big and small still struggle with shaking the snail mail, a new report has claimed that the great hope of the paperless office, email, is on the way out already. It is surmised that email will be replaced within a few years by private portals which allow users to post messages to a “wall” and tag individuals, essentially giving corporations their own private Facebook.
Jon Norris | Lifestyle & Time out,Technology
Every website should have a blog. Content is king, as they say, and you’ll need some kind of Content Management System (CMS) to keep that content organised.
UK companies have been warned to take control of employee’s social media usage in the workplace or risk facing reputation damage and security breaches. With the recent rapid increase in social media usage, it has been revealed that 51% of employees engage with sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn while at work.
Selina Murray | Lifestyle & Time out,Resources
If there’s one thing we’ve learnt from Ryan Giggs in the last few weeks, it’s how not to use Twitter for business. Love it or loathe it (probably the latter for Mr. Giggs), Twitter can be a very useful business tool. If you work alone it can be invaluable for making connections.
Rachel Soothill | Guides,Technology
Now we have established what a powerful communication tool social media has become, the next step is to learn how to harness that power and use it for getting your business and key messages out there. Social media is rapidly becoming the chosen channel for businesses to communicate and share ideas, and should form a strong part of your online marketing strategy.
Rachel Soothill | Lifestyle & Time out,Technology
If we didn’t appreciate the power of social media previously, the latest news headlines have confirmed just how influential platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are. Twitter in particular has hit the headlines recently after making a mockery of England’s privacy laws. While I couldn’t care less about who Ryan Giggs is bonking, the situation has grabbed my attention as it highlights the effectiveness of social media communication.
Around two weeks ago a cadre of UK entrepreneurs, with backing from some big corporate partners, launch the Start Up Britain campaign. The aim of the programme was to stir the UK’s entrepreneurial spirit and encourage more people to strike out on their own by offering what the organisers called a “£1,500 support package”.
In this months podcast, we’re looking at how you can promote your services as a creative in the increasingly-populated freelancing marketplace. Andy talks to Scott Belsky of Behance, an online portfolio platform catering specifically to freelancers working in creative fields, about how they can utilise their service to better market their service.
Completely unscientific of course, but a quick polling of the Twitterverse has yielded some interesting results as to what the biggest annoyances for freelancers are.
The results, somewhat unsurprisingly, focus on the behaviour of certain unscrupulous clients
Jon Norris | Getting a Job,Training
I’m fairly well known in the Freelance Advisor offices as a massive sceptic when it comes to social media “gurus”, or anyone who offers to run your social media for you. This is for a number of reasons.
Jon Norris | Lifestyle & Time out
The Daily Mail’s attack dog Richard Littlejohn has applied more of his unique brand of “common sense” to the increasingly vitriolic debate on how to tackle the national deficit. The chancellor George Osborne has publicly asked for ideas on how to bring in more revenue, however we can’t see Littlejohn’s proposals holding much water.
Much is written about the art of engaging consumers via social media and what constitutes best practice. For freelancers, communication via social media arguably comes more easily than it does for sizeable business entities. Though there are fewer pitfalls for the flexi-worker, who for the most part just needs to bathe in a flattering light in front of current and future clients, for those a little more demanding of their social media results it’s important to understand why people disengage.
As with all new, exciting things, big business has been a bit slow to catch on with social media. Some businesses have “got it”, and have used social media to great effect (See the Facebook Skittles Campaign, or the genuinely helpful Heathrow Twitter feed), and some are still lagging behind – thinking it is enough to simply register an account and leave it unattended.
Although the importance of social media is well established in the UK, we still trail a long way behind the US. However, that is all set to change in 2011 according to a new report by freelance work portal Office Cavalry. In fact, the findings are particularly positive for those freelancers specialising, or hoping to specialise, in social media marketing.
Here’s a breakdown…
It’s Friday, January 28th, which can only mean one thing: it’s international Data Privacy Day! Cue ticker tape and hastily draped bunting in the town square. Or perhaps not. This is, after all, a private affair.
Many freelancers and contractors have their own website which is either a fun hobby-horse or an online space for promoting their expertise and getting work. In such instances you probably don’t want to spend much time, let alone money, on attracting web traffic. The most effective way of achieving this is to promote it socially. This can be done online and in the physical world – social networking shouldn’t just happen in the online space.
What follows are a few simple tips on utilising key social tools to help increase web hits.
It seems that Yahoo is doing away with ‘Delicious’ the social bookmarking tool. However, there seems to be doubt about whether the service will be picked up by another company or killed off in its entirety. The Delicious blog has published a post which suggests it will live on in some form…
CVs; we all have them, we’ve all read them and we all hate them. If Cthulhu himself had been sitting about on his throne of skulls or whatever thinking about the most horrific punishment to inflict on every working man and woman between the ages of 16 and 65, he would not have gone far wrong with the invention of the Curriculum Vitae. Coming from the Latin expression meaning; “to put ones-self up for ridicule”, curricula vitarum have been the mainstay of HR decisions for nearly two millennia.
Freelancing in the 21st century offers a limitless number of opportunities for helping you become more efficient and finding more work. Technology really is a freelancers best friend.
So, what are these opportunities and how does the 21st freelancer make the most of them. Read on…
Jon Norris | Lifestyle & Time out,Working From Home
Have you been outside recently? Cold, isn’t it. Apparently we’re seeing the coldest November since 1985, and various parts of England are now blanketed with snow. Incidentally, if you’ve not seen it, some clever clogs has put together a crowd-sourced map of UK snowfall using Twitter. Make sure to geo-tag your tweets and include the hashtag #uksnow to be included!
Social media isn’t going to be around forever, but it’s going to get a lot bigger before it goes away – it’s a pretty big deal at the moment. If you don’t have a Twitter presence for your brand then you’re a sucker, and if you don’t have a Facebook fan page then you’re a chump.
I recently wrote a piece on showcasing your services online, the importance of brand identity and the minimum requirement for an online presence – and no, it really ought not be time-consuming or something you need to constantly update. Though it does have to be ‘up-to-date’.
Michael Rose | Lifestyle & Time out
At Freelance Advisor we’ve spent a lot of time sharing advice on how you can effectively use Twitter and social. As a tool for finding more friends, colleagues clients and work. We’ve discussed how to use it for Marketing your personal brand and for PR for your own company.
This cheeky little site has a different view…
Sandy Dempsey | Getting a Job,Training
If you’ve not yet joined the 75 million strong Twitterati, Sandy Dempsey founder of The Dreaming Cafe gives us five great tips on how to get started, why you should use Twitter and other social networking tools, and how to make it work for you and your business.
A few years ago getting heard on Twitter was easy. When I first joined there were less than a million users and it was easy to find friends with common interests and it was even possible for a couple of friend to create a trending topic.
Now with 70m+ users (sending 50m tweets a day) the story is a little different…
Sinead Mac Manus | Getting a Job
As a freelancer, getting out from behind the desk (or kitchen table) and out into the real world is crucial for building relationships and winning new business. The pervasive nature of social media means that we are increasingly connected online. We tweet about our day on Twitter post news on Facebook, and share our location on Foursquare.
Social Entrepreneur Sinead Mac Manus shares 4 ways to use digital tools and social media to make the most of networking opportunities.
Andy talks to Web and Social Media Developer John O’Nolan and Darren Fell of Crunch about the power of personal branding. Choosing your brand Using Twitter to create a conversation Facebook, following and fans Social media as customer service Social media strategy and setup Listen to the podcast:
Podcast 24: Personal Branding for Freelancers & Contractors [ 29:46 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
A twitter stream for National Freelancers Day…
See what people are saying, find out about events all over the UK. And who is attending.
Celebrate your Freedom and your role in the UK economy.
Freelance Advisor is on Twitter And you can follow us here. If you’ve not yet joined the twittering classes then you’re missing out on the latest social networking phenomenon – according to TwitDir, the unofficial Twitter Directory, there are now over 3,000,000 users and the Twitterverse is still growing. If you’ve used Facebook and their Status [...]
