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Top five Twitter success tips for small businesses

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Top five Twitter success tips for small businesses

Following on from our blog on top tips for getting started on Twitter, this posts looks at specifics that small businesses can and should do to boost their profile and sales.

Assuming that you took all the advice in the previous post linked to above, then you are now in possession of a well-optimised account with a profile picture and summary information, and are hopefully tweeting reasonably regularly.

That’s obviously a good start, but building on that so you can increase your reach and target people who could potentially become new customers is what Twitter is all about for small businesses. With this in mind, we offer five tips designed to do just that:

1. Seek out local business groups and networking organisations, as well as simply individuals, by using the Twitter search function and searching for towns and areas in the vicinity. Following these accounts will hopefully encourage them to do the same back to you, and you are immediately linked in to an informative and influential circle. As well as making you more visible locally, this may also give you hints and tips about networking events close to you as well, which will help boost your profile even further.

2. Look for hashtag events that cover your area.  Hashtags are words with a # before them during tweets, so that anyone can search on the #word and see all the tweets around it.  Increasingly, local businesses are gathering together networking and sharing contacts via hashtags, often for a specific hour each week. Using hashtags such as #fleethour and #northantshour local businesses introduce themselves and share information and news. Check with other businesses or try some sample hashtags to see if there is one of these near you. If not, consider starting one!

3. Find and assimilate relevant information for your area of business, and share key nuggets with your followers. These can either be retweets (RTs) of reports or articles that may be of interest, pithy quotes that sum up an issue or, possible best of all, a link to a well-optimised blog on your site explaining your thoughts on whatever the issue is. Whichever you choose, the aim is to be, as well as look, like an expert in your area to attract more followers and keep the interest of the ones that you have already amassed.

4. Promote your Twitter handle on your marketing material and encourage customers to contact you there – the real-time element can impress if you respond in a quick and timely manner. Only do this, though, if you monitor your account and any mentions or replies to you frequently, as not getting a response is bound to irritate.

5. Offer Twitter-only offers. Whether it’s a free gift with a purchase or a discount code for Twitter followers, offer them something tangible as a bonus for following you. It could mean the difference between them going with you or a competitor, so taking time to value who is looking at your tweets is never a waste of time.

Finally, just engage, listen and tweet in whatever proportions work for you and your availability. Twitter has no set rules, so follow our tips as much as they help but never be afraid to experiment.

World Cup 2014 was the most mobile yet

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World Cup 2014 was the most mobile yet

The World Cup 2014 has been the most mobile one yet, as a record number of football fans followed all of the action on and off the field with smart devices.

The rapid take-up of smartphones and tables, combined with the growing availability of 4G mobile and Wi-Fi hotspots, meant it was easier than ever to follow games without having to be in front of a television.

Smartphone use more than doubled since the last World Cup in 2010 in South Africa, from 30 per cent to 62 per cent, giving more people than ever before the chance to keep in touch on a mobile device and leading Ofcom to dub this year’s event the most mobile yet.

Brazil 2014 was also expected to be the first World Cup that saw a significant use of tablet computers to follow the action. In 2010, the first Apple iPad had only just been launched, whereas now 30 per cent of UK adults, nearly a third of the population, use tablets to go online.

With the World Cup 2014 being held in a time zone significantly different to ours, this new technology was vital in helping UK football fans to keep up-to-date on matches.

For games that kicked-off at 5pm, smartphones and tablets allowed fans to keep an eye on the score, tweet and even watch live on the commute home or while they finished up in the office. Football fans were also able to take their tablets to bed to watch the 11pm kick-offs if a night in the pub before an early start did not appeal.

UK 4G mobile services were still two years from launch during the 2010 World Cup, while today there are around 6.5 million UK 4G subscriptions, with the vast majority of other mobile customers using 3G. During the 2010 World Cup, fewer than four in ten mobile connections were on a 3G network.

Fans were also able to connect to the 34,000 public free-to-access Wi-Fi hotspots across the UK to follow the action, which is more than double the number available four years ago.

Of course, the explosion in social media allowed more fans to engage with the games and the squad than ever before.

Ofcom’s research shows that 66 per cent, or two thirds of adults, in the UK have a social media profile, up from 54 per cent in 2010. There was also more capacity for live tweeting or posting during matches compared to 2010, as more than 53 per cent of mobile users now access social media sites on a mobile compared to 22 per cent in 2010.

FIFA announced that it had set up its first Instagram account to post photos for international football fans during the
World Cup. Ofcom’s research suggests this could boost engagement with younger people especially, as social networkers aged 16-24 are almost three times more likely to use Instagram than the average UK adult who social networks, with 31
per cent versus 12 per cent.

Ofcom announces new rules for Openreach repairs

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Ofcom announces new rules for Openreach repairs

Ofcom has announced new rules designed to improve Openreach’s performance on repairs and installations.

The draft rules, which are expected to come into force this Summer, set out new minimum performance standards for Openreach, the company that installs and maintains connections to BT’s network on behalf of competing providers.

They are designed to ensure phone and broadband customers get a better service, and have already been notified to the European Commission.

Under the targets, Openreach is expected to repair the vast majority of phone and broadband faults within two working days. Customers who request a new phone line should get an appointment for one within 12 working days.

While the rules are expected to formally come in in the coming months, they will escalate to the intended level by 2016, to give Openreach time to get appropriate systems in place.

Failure to meet these targets will result in Openreach facing sanctions, including fines. The targets will be adjusted to take into account jobs where external factors, such as extreme weather, meant meeting the target was not possible. It is expected that up to three per cent of repairs and one per cent of installations in a typical year might be delayed due to such factors.

Separately, Ofcom will also review the standards of redress, which could include compensation, that landline and broadband providers offer to consumers when they suffer problems.  The new targets, which are part of Ofcom’s Fixed Access Market Reviews, stipulate that Openreach should:

– Complete around 80 per cent of repairs to reported faults within two working days.

– Provide an appointment for around 80 per cent of new line installations within 12 working days of the request.

Report publicly on its performance, which will allow Ofcom to monitor and intervene further if required; and make clear the timeframe for jobs which take longer than these targets, to provide reassurance to consumers about how long the work is likely to take.

As another element of the Fixed Access Market Reviews, a wide-ranging set of decisions in the wholesale telecoms markets used by companies to offer telephone and broadband services to UK consumers, Ofcom has also moved to boost superfast broadband competition.

Currently companies that take on anyone wishing to change their superfast broadband provider must pay a £50 fee to Openreach, which is often passed on to the customer. Ofcom intends to cut this to £11, which would allow providers to offer lower retail start-up fees. They also propose reducing the term of the wholesale contract when a superfast customer switches from one year to one month, meaning telecoms providers will be able to offer shorter retail contracts.

Ofcom has, however, made clear it is not planning to set the wholesale pricing levels for Openreach’s fibre service, believing market forces such as availability of standard broadband and competition from Virgin Media’s cable network naturally constrain it.

Heartbleed – and what it means for small businesses and data

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Heartbleed - and what it means for small businesses and data

The Heartbleed bug is bad news for most companies, including small businesses, both because it potentially leaves
customer data open to hackers and because of the scale of the web traffic involved. Even though the weakness, which exploits
a flaw in popular open source encryption software.

Open SSL has been around since March 2012, its existence has only come to prominence in April this year. Worryingly, experts believe that up to two thirds of all websites have been compromised so how do you know if your business or data is at risk?

Open SSL runs on web servers and was designed to protect traffic that carried personal data between users and
supposedly secure sites such as banking and shopping carts. It’s used widely across the web, from huge companies such as Yahoo down to small e-commerce sites.

But it has now emerged in what has been dubbed the world’s ultimate web nightmare that these encryption keys
could be lifted from the sites themselves if the Heartbleed bug had compromised them. Worse, it can be done without leaving a trace.

“The main worry is for small e-commerce sites that do not know they have been affected,” says Keith
Cottenden, director at cybersecurity specialists CY4OR told the BBC.”Any business that takes customer details could be
vulnerable because this encryption is designed to protect personal data. Businesses need to apply mitigation now.”

Effective and robust data security is business-critical for companies of all sizes, but the cost is often disproportionately high for
smaller outfits.

While bad data handling can cost clients and trust both key to the success of small businesses many companies have inadequate systems in place, either because of a lack of resources and understanding, and rely on a head-in-the-sand approach when something like Heartbleed occurs. But the expert opinion in this case is that no company can
afford to ignore Heartbleed.

The bug has been around for two years, meaning that anything held in that time could potentially have been accessed if your website relied on Open SSL for secure communications with users, and there’s no way of knowing if this has happened. While the advice to users is to change passwords once sites have been fixed, the onus is on sites to update their security systems
first, otherwise the new password is also vulnerable.

Key steps to take to make sure any data such as credit card details or passwords that your site holds is secure includes updating Open SSL on each individual internet-facing computer you have, as well as revoking your SSL certificates and generating new ones.

If you have an IT department, they should be able to sort this for you if not and this sounds confusing, then it is likely that you need assistance from specialists for this and other data security needs.

1 in 4 UK households now has superfast broadband

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1 in 4 UK households now has superfast broadband

One in four UK residential fixed broadband connections is now superfast, according to the latest Ofcom research.

The proportion of superfast connections defined as those offering headline speeds of at least 30Mbits/s has risen from 5 per cent in November 2011 to 25 per cent in November 2013.

The study found that the average superfast connection speed is also continuing to rise, reaching 47.0Mbit/sec by the end of last year an increase of 47 per cent, or 15.1Mbit/sec, since May 2010.

These figures come from Ofcom’s tenth report, which measures consumers’ actual broadband speeds as opposed to the advertised headline speeds. As well as superfast broadband, the report also covers ADSL broadband, which accounts for 69 per cent of UK residential broadband connections.

Ed Richards, Ofcom chief executive, said: “The growth in superfast broadband and the rise in average speeds is testament to the investment in the sector.”

But the benefits are not shared evenly across the UK. There is more work needed to deliver wider availability of broadband and superfast broadband, particularly in rural communities but also in some locations within cities to enable wider access to fast internet. The report found marked disparities between the average speeds available in urban, suburban and rural areas, despite a general improvement across the country put down to increased investment in broadband technology.

Indicative analysis suggests that the average urban download speed in November 2013 was 31.9Mbit/sec, the average suburban download speed was 21.8Mbit/sec, and that the average speeds in rural areas increased from 9.9Mbit/sec to 11.3Mbit/sec between May and November 2013.

They noted, however, that the rural sample sizes from which these averages were taken were not large enough to be statistically significant and could only be indicative. A key reason for the slower speeds in rural areas is the limited availability of superfast broadband services, although broadband speeds over ADSL, a technology that uses the copper wire telephone network, are generally also slower in rural areas because of the longer distances to the telephone exchange.

Improving speeds in rural areas is a priority for the Government which has committed funding to ensure superfast broadband is more widely available across the UK. It has reported it is on course to reach 90 per cent superfast coverage by early 2016 and recently announced an extra £250 million investment to extend superfast coverage to 95 per cent of premises by 2017.

The report also reveals that at 17.8Mbit/s, the average actual fixed-line residential broadband speed in the UK is almost five times faster than the 3.6Mbit/s it was five years ago when Ofcom first began publishing the data, in November 2008.

Ofcom: UK overtakes major EU nations for superfast broadband

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Ofcom: UK overtakes major EU nations for superfast broadband

New figures show that the UK has the highest take-up and coverage of superfast broadband of the EU’s five biggest economies.

Ofcom’s European Broadband Scorecard shows that the UK leads France, Germany, Italy and Spain on most measures of coverage, take-up, usage and choice for both mobile and fixed broadband, and performs well on price.

The report found that the availability of superfast broadband in the UK has increased from around 60 per cent at the end of 2011 to 73 percent now. This has taken us from third to first for coverage among the so-called EU5 group of countries.

Take-up of superfast broadband, which is capable of providing speeds of at least 30Mbit/s, had reached nine in every 100 people in the UK at the start of last year, well ahead of the next best performing country, Spain, where it had reached just six in 100.

The most recent comparable data for the EU5 countries also showed that the UK has the highest broadband take-up of all types, with 83 per cent of households being able to access it.

Britons were also the people who did most shopping online, with 77 per cent having made an internet purchase in the past year. The UK also enjoys the highest weekly usage of the internet of the five, at 87 per cent, and the lowest proportion of people who have never used the internet, with only eight per cent saying this is true for them.

Ed Richards, Ofcom Chief Executive, said: This is excellent progress for the UK, but there is more to be done. We want to see even wider availability of superfast broadband across the UK, so as many people as possible can enjoy faster speeds to access the internet.

There is also more progress to be made to ensure consumers receive consistently high quality of service, including faster line repairs and installations for broadband and telephony.

Ofcom has also analysed a range of broadband product baskets, by examining average and lowest prices available for different packages. The UK comes either first or second within the EU5 on all measures of average price, and either second or third on measures of the lowest available price.

This is excellent news for telecoms companies such as Boxx Communications, who exist to provide top quality and competitively-priced broadband packages to businesses.

Today’s European Broadband Scorecard is Ofcom’s second report for Government on the coverage, take-up, usage, price and choice of fixed and mobile broadband services in the UK, relative to other European countries.

The Government has previously stated its ambition that the UK should have both the best superfast broadband network in Europe and the fastest broadband of any major European country by 2015.

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