How to Achieve a Better Work-Life Balance

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How to acheive a better work-life balanceToday, we’re more connected than we’ve ever been. What with laptops, smartphones and tablets padding our bags, there’s never been a better time to be a remote worker. Add to this the profusion of tools and applications, like Dropbox, Gmail and Skype – all of which put our vital files and messages within arm’s reach wherever we are – and you can see why the lines between work and life are more blurred than ever.

As a mother, wife and professional virtual assistant, I often find myself working when I perhaps shouldn’t be. Not because I can’t manage my time – I can do that standing on my head – but instead because I’m always attentive to my clients’ needs. For example, if I get an email in the evening from one of my clients asking me for some out of hour’s assistance, I’ll more often than not oblige.

An article I recently read on the Huffington Post really got me thinking about work-life balance and was ultimately the inspiration for this post.

So how can you start achieving a better work-life balance today? Here are my top tips:

Hire a Virtual Assistant

Oh come on, don’t look so surprised – it was always going to be on this list. Not because it’s my livelihood, but rather that I genuinely believe in the real value that most Virtual Assistants afford for their clients.

Hiring a virtual assistant is something you should absolutely consider if you find yourself spending too much time on the mundane tasks and not enough time enjoying the fruits of your labour.

Virtual Assistants like myself can help people like you get back to doing what you do best – growing your business.

Scrutinize your workload

Time is our most valuable commodity and we can’t simply buy more of it. That’s why you need to ensure that you are using every minute of yours in the most productive way possible.

Scrutinize every task you carry out and decide if they all add real value. The ones that don’t should be offloaded to someone else, either internally or externally.

Learn to switch off

What I’m referring to here is your multitude of devices. The gadgets that make you constantly contactable both day and night are the things that make you super-efficient, yet inevitably destroy a small part of your balance.

Simple things like turning your smartphone off during dinner or if you’re on holiday, leaving your tablet in the hotel room and not taking it to the swimming pool. Out of sight really is out of mind, right?

Respect your self-imposed boundaries

You’ll never realise a better work-life balance if you cannot learn to respect your own boundaries. As with any change it will seem slightly alien in the beginning but you will learn to embrace going forward.

Routines are a great way to teach yourself, to adopt different ways of working. You almost want your boundaries to become habits. Unwritten rules that you don’t even need to think about because they come so naturally.

If you don’t respect your own boundaries then other people definitely won’t…

Pinterest & Snapchat Offer two Fresh Advertising Platforms for your Brand

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We all know that having an active social media presence serves to promote your business and allows you to engage with your customers and prospects. But while Facebook and Twitter are often the two social networks that get the most attention from brands, Pinterest and Snapchat have introduced paid advertising offerings that provide different angles for your business to leverage.

Pinterest & Snapchat Offer two Fresh Advertising Platforms for your Brand

Introducing Pinterest promoted pins

Pinterest is rather unique in that it’s a highly visual social network which allows users to create stunning visual collections (boards). However, Pinterest is often overlooked by brands but why? After all, at the last count Pinterest boasts more than 70 million users. Furthermore, the majority of its user base are women – some 80% in fact.

Therefore, if your business/brand uses a lot of visual content and your target audience are predominantly women, Pinterest could represent a great opportunity for you. Plus, with the announcement of promoted pins, there has never been a better time to get interested in Pinterest or Pinterested! (sorry, I couldn’t resist).

Promoted pins are Pinterest’s paid advertising offering and operate on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis. They allow you to promote specific pins based on set criteria that you stipulate. For example, you can choose to target certain demographics, specific locations and even different types of devices.

The best part is that you only pay when somebody actually clicks through to your website from your promoted pin. There’s also no need to worry about spiraling advertising costs as you are able to set daily budgets and duration for every campaign.

There are, of course, a number of rules that advertisers must follow, but these are run-of-the-mill and to be expected.

Promoted pins are still in beta and currently only available to select US-based businesses. However, it’s inevitable that they’ll be rolled out across the board in the future and will present another advertising platform for your business utilize.

Snapchat Advertising is upon us

Ephemeral messaging application Snapchat may not seem like a lucrative platform to focus your marketing efforts on, but don’t dismiss it just yet. Especially as, the start-up – which has been valued at $10 billion has now opened up its gates to advertisers.

With some 100 million active monthly users – 71% of who are under 25 – Snapchat presents quite an opportunity for brands who want to get their marketing in front of millenials (that’s generation Y for those of you who aren’t familiar with the term).

The announcement that Snapchat would start rolling out paid ads was made on its blog last week. The company said that US-based users would see an advertisement over the weekend and judging by the online buzz that definitely was the case.

Snapchat wanted to emphasis that its ad offering would not detract from the user experience that people have come to love using its app. Ads will only appear in the Recent Updates section and never in personal communications (chats).

Snapchat’s decision to roll out paid ads shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, they need to justify their huge price tag and the company’s own blog post states that their reason is simply to make money.

However, they further added: “We want to see if we can deliver an experience that’s fun and informative, the way ads used to be, before they got creepy and targeted”. A statement that’s quite ironic considering that the first ad to be displayed was for Ouija – a horror movie by Universal Pictures.

Pinterest’s promoted pins and Snapchat’s paid advertising may not yet be available to UK businesses but they almost certainly will be. Will you be utilizing them?

Introducing WEST by Box, Facebook and Pinterest

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Introducing WEST

Last week, the Facebook Newsroom announced a new initiative that the social network has launched in conjunction with Box and Pinterest. WEST, as its known, stands for Women Entering and Staying in Tech and, in my mind, is a fantastic program.

When it comes to Computer Science, there has long been a gender gap in the industry, both in workforce’s across the globe and in the educational pipelines where tomorrow’s generation of Computer Scientists will emerge.

In fact, the United States Census Bureau has reported that technical roles in the country will continue to increase and are expected to reach 1.4 million by 2020. However, the number of women filling these positions has been steadily declining since the 1990s.

That’s why Facebook, Pinterest and Box have teamed up to create WEST, a one-on-one mentorship program that is designed to help more women adopt and ultimately flourish in these types of technical role.

The aim is to bring together highly experienced women from the top technology companies across the industry to help build and maintain a focussed mentorship program. It will be driven by the day-to-day work that these individuals do and geared towards the exciting technical opportunities that are becoming available.

Opening in 2015, WEST will be looking to attract female mentees in their early to middle career stages. It will feature a series of 1:1 and group interactions face-to-face, as well as online sessions over the course of a year.

Initially, the program will be open to women in the Bay Area in the U.S. but if it proves successful then we can hope to see an expansion going forward. I for one, hope that UK women will be able to take advantage of this great initiative in the future.

Mentorship is something that is very powerful and can help shape an individual’s life including their career choices, lifestyle outcomes and overall success.

Influential individuals, like Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, have long voiced their opinions about the need for more women in technical roles. The Facebook COO famously said in an interview with 60 Minutes that, “A man and a man at a bar at a hotel during a work trip – that looks like mentoring. A man and a woman at a bar at a hotel on a work trip, that doesn’t look like mentoring to anyone.”

It speaks volumes that three huge companies, like Facebook, Box and Pinterest, have decided to undertake this venture. They obviously want to tackle a problem that has been developing for some time. Hopefully, their lead will make other businesses take note and perhaps even offer similar programs.

When industry giants make a decision to create a bespoke mentoring program for women from the ground up, it can only lead to more diversity in the technical industry as a whole going forward.

You can find out a little more about WEST here. There’s even an application form but unless you live in the Bay Area in the United States it’s obsolete at present.

What’s your view on WEST? Should women be given a helping hand with mentorship programs like this or will doing so ultimately put men at a disadvantage?

I’d love to hear your thoughts below…

Fake “Likes” are now on Facebook’s radar

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Fake Likes are now on FB radar

Facebook recently announced on their business blog that they are now taking a much firmer stance against fake activity; especially fake likes. Therefore, if your business has ever bought likes or is thinking of buying some, my advice is – absolutely don’t.

To understand the issue with fake likes, we need to first look at the purpose of genuine likes and the value they bring. When someone likes your business page it creates a connection between them and your brand. Any future updates you post are likely to appear in that user’s news feed, giving you a channel through which to communicate.

Over time, you can build relationships with your followers by providing them with useful and informative posts. If these posts strike the right chord, there is a strong chance your followers will in turn re-share them, thus boosting your brand’s reach even further.

With established relationships in place and engaged followers, your brand is in the best possible position to pitch potential sales via social media channels. You cannot do this if all the likes your page has are fake.

But if fake likes serve no purpose, why do people buy them?

The simple answer is to make their business appear more popular than it actually is and the businesses who tend to do this are just starting out on their social media journeys.

Fake likes can also prevent genuine followers from seeing your updates, which is disastrous for your online marketing efforts.

The reality is that the only people who benefit from fake likes are the ones who sell them. It’s no wonder then that Facebook are now taking a much tougher stance on this practice – which is essentially spam.

Using their sophisticated rules and machine learning, the social networking giant are constantly looking to identify suspicious behaviour. When they do, they undertake all means necessary to eliminate it. This may involve blocking associated accounts and removing all fake likes instantly.

Therefore, if you’ve paid for fake likes, they are very likely to be removed in the future without warning. Imagine how it will look when your business page’s followers take an overnight nosedive.

It’s not just technical measures, however, that Facebook use to combat spam on their platform. According to their blog post, the social network “have obtained nearly $2 billion in legal judgments against spammers” – something that might make people who sell likes think twice about in the future.

Furthermore, Facebook now also limit the amount of likes that accounts can give and sometimes ask for additional verification, limiting the spammers’ overall effectiveness.

When you first start building your online presence it can be tempting to try and boost your perceived popularity. However, this will not benefit you in the long-run and may even come back to bite you.

Remember that the purpose of your social media marketing campaigns is to build relationships with your customers and nurture them through to fruition. Fake likes may make you seem like a successful business but you’re only kidding yourselves.

Create content that is fresh and resonates with your audience. Genuine likes and shares will soon follow and your business will benefit from a much more responsive follower base.