Is your small business using social media effectively? Is your small business using social media at all?
Yesterday we took a look at the importance of having a website and the influence this can have on the growth of a small business, and today we’re going to get to grips with how small businesses in the UK are using social media.
If you’re the owner of a very small business – we love an abbreviation here so let’s call it a VSB – and you don’t have a website, you’re potentially missing out on vital future growth.
More worrying still is that you’re far from alone as 60% of VSBs in the UK are without a website.
So just how important is a website to a small business?
The average number of journeys taken in the UK fell to 921 last year – the lowest number since records began, according to the latest figures from the Department for Transport’s National Travel Survey.
Trips for shopping and commuting falling consistently since the mid-1990s and this year’s figure represents a drop of 16% on the number of trips taken in 1995.
The fall in the number of trips taken by car has fallen since the mid-2000s, in spite of the fact there’s been no change in the number of households with access to car.
So what’s happening on the roads?
If you’re an employer, you may be concerned that offering staff the chance to work from home could lead to a drop in productivity – but for many employees, the exact opposite is true and some feel the need to get away from the office to concentrate on their work.
A FlexJobs survey of over 2,600 employees found more than three-quarters (76%) of respondents get out of the office when they have to focus on important projects.
And of those who do prefer to work in the office, many would sooner work there out of the traditional nine-to-five office hours.
So is it time to end the nine-to-five?
Do you wake up each morning feeling like you could do with an extra hour or two before you’re ready to face the day ahead? Do you often hit the wall mid-afternoon? Do you struggle to switch off from the working day, or feel compelled to check social media last thing at night, first thing in the morning, or both?
Then it sounds like you could be suffering from technology addiction.
It seems Londoners can breathe a sigh of relief for now as this week’s planned London Tube strikes have been suspended. The bad news for commuters in the capital is the Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) union has set two new strike dates for next month.
The hackers who last month attacked the Ashley Madison website have today released the names, email addresses, phone numbers and partial credit card numbers of 37 million users of the infidelity site.
Carphone Warehouse has been subjected to a cyber attack that could have seen the personal details of up to 2.4 million customers compromised and the encrypted credit card details of 90,000 customers accessed.
And although most Carphone Warehouse customers will remain unaffected, customers of the OneStopPhoneShop.com, e2save.com and Mobiles.co.uk subsidiaries may have more to worry about.
US president Barack Obama has used a conference call to issue a rallying cry to drum up political support for the Iran nuclear agreement, which will ban the middle eastern nation from arming itself with nuclear weapons.
Obama told the conference call participants: “You guys have to get more active and loud and involved and informed. This is a very good deal that we should be proud of. Iran under this agreement can never get a nuclear weapon.”
It’s less than a week since Windows 10 launched and Microsoft has come in for some heavy criticism following revelations its new operating system collects data on ‘everything you do’