I had my dedicated VA work on two ‘test’ projects. Project 1 was a research project which I considered to be rather easy … it basically entailed the VA going to Twitter, Facebook and YouTube with the intention to find competitors of a company then place the information in an excel sheet. I wanted how many followers the account had, views etc. Easy information to find. He took 5 hours to do this project. I did this for another company and it took me about an hour for the same number of companies etc. He also asked me about 5 questions which was frustrating because I was extremely detailed in the explanation.

The second project was more on the research/data analysis side. I needed to find articles, blog posts, etc about local search specifically google maps. The articles he found were horrible. Not from reliable sources at all.  I didn’t ask for services and he gave me a list of services as well. I specifically said no services.

I have requested a new VA.  For this next project they will be developing a social media report.  I have made a video on exactly how to do everything. I am hoping to get better results with this. This will be a bi-weekly task which probably will take 2 hours max. It takes me about 1 hour to do it all.

Have you ever used a VA? If so what service did you go with? How did you like it? Give me some feedback. Thanks everyone.

Here are some examples of the awesome honest responses to people:

Chipotle does a fantastic job interacting with guests. I hope to have a vibrant and flourishing community like they do soon. They truly are the epitome of good social media practices.

Emulate them. Learn from them. Do what they do!

Who do you think does an amazing job at engaging people within social media? I clearly like Chipotle. Who do you like?

BONUS – here is a great interview with Colin. Love that.

I will probably also post the job on sites like odesk and elance.

I will keep you informed and updated. I hope I can find a rock star.

Problem:

We have several Twitter accounts.  They all need separate email addresses because Twitter requires a unique email addresses for each account. We just obtained @bucaphilly and we have @bucadibepo so I needed two separate emails. We could be create a Twitter account for each store. If we did that … we would need 84 accounts. Imagine managing 84 accounts. 84 different email addresses and passwords. What a headache. I needed a long term solution.

Solution:

Create 1 gmail account. That’s right 1. Not 1 account for each Twitter account but 1 account for all of the Twitter accounts. But how might you ask. Great question. Here’s how.

I created a gmail account. Lets say its bucatweets@gmail.com (its not so go ahead and spam that account). With all gmail accounts you can append a plus sign to the end of your email address.  What I did was took the main email address and appended the store number to the end.  For example: @bucaphilly is store number 4123 (hypothetical) the email address for @bucaphilly that I gave Twitter was bucatweets+4123@gmail.com. You can then set up filters within gmail to direct the emails into different folders and have them labeled so that everything is nice and organized.  This enables you to have only 1 email address for the billions of Twitter accounts that you have.

Here’s an awesome article by gmail with more information on how to set everything up. And here is an article on how to set up filters.

How do you handle organizing your emails? What has been effective for you?

I utilized this HTML/FBML code:

<fb:fbml version="1.1">
<fb:visible-to-connection>
<div id="fansonly">
<img height="500" src="fansonly.jpg" />
</div>
<fb:else>
<div id="nofans" style="position: absolute; top: 0;">
<img height="500" src="sadface.jpg" />
</div>
</fb:else>
</fb:visible-to-connection>
</fb:fbml>

It worked like a charm! Now to make it even better!

I want people who go to the fan page to hit this particular tab! To do that is realitivly easy.  Click on the edit button for the entire fan page. Then check out the image below!

The tab I want is the Welcome tab. I selected it and now anyone that visits my page will be directed to this tab first!

Just a couple of notes:

1. If you are the developer it won’t appear right. Logout and login and view it from a different account which isn’t an admin on the account. It will work then!
2. To do this type of campaign you NEED to use a tab!
3. Make sure you know how big you can make the image! I suggest width 720px and height can really be anything … but don’t get too crazy.

I hope this helps out someone else! Let me know if you have any questions!  How have you used FBML to make your Facebook Fan page even better?