Social media, like Facebook and Twitter, can be an effective way for service professionals to stay in touch with clients and find new ones. But to get the most out of your posting and tweeting, be sure to combine it with online scheduling! Here are a few ideas to optimize your socializing:

Add an Appointment App to Your Facebook Page

Facebook can be a fantastic way to stay top-of-mind with your clients and encourage them to recommend your services to their friends. The trick is posting something on your wall that they’ll want to share – like an offer to buy one/get one free or a reward for referrals. Then make it super easy for friends on Facebook to make appointments by adding a ‘Schedule Now’ tab to your business page using Full Slate’s Facebook app.

Fill Openings in Your Schedule with Twitter

Last-minute cancellations and slow days are an inevitable facet of the service industry, but with an active Twitter following and online scheduling, you can fill the gaps. Just fire off a tweet about those openings with a tiny URL linking to your online scheduler. Time-sensitive deals are one of Twitter’s Best Practices for Businesses. Tweeting discounts on same-day and next-day appointments gives people a reason to follow you and can turn idle time into billable hours.

Link to Your Online Scheduler in Blog Posts

A blog is a great way to announce new services and special offers. Be sure to include a link to your appointment scheduler in these posts. You can make a schedule appointment button that links to openings for a specific provider or service under Web > Buttons in Full Slate.

Send an Automatic Follow-up Email to Generate Reviews

Online review sites like Yelp and Google Places are a great source of new clients. People go there to find popular businesses and the more reviews you have, the better.

How can you get more reviews? Easy. Set up an automatic follow-up email in Full Slate to go out after every appointment.  Thank your client for coming in, link them to your Yelp and Google Places profiles, and ask for feedback. Don’t be afraid of a few negative reviews – they actually enhance credibility.

You might consider adding a Yelp Deal or Google Offer for new clients too… and don’t forget to link right to your appointment scheduler!

A few of us here at Full Slate had the opportunity to attend ‘Entrepreneur Day’ at Intuit’s Mountain View, CA campus earlier this week.  Across the board, we were impressed with Intuit’s commitment to small businesses.

I think most people associate Intuit with ‘back-office’ functions such as accounting, taxes, payroll, payments, etc.  Intuit clearly offers valuable products to help small businesses with these functions.  The Entrepreneur Day events helped us realize that Intuit aspires to solve the biggest problems faced by small businesses.  Based on recent research, Intuit believes that the biggest challenge most small businesses currently face is growth – finding new customers and increasing revenue from existing customers.  Intuit is taking several steps to offer new or enhanced products and services that help small businesses address this challenge.

Entrepreneur Day also demonstrated Intuit’s commitment to new technologies and services – including online appointment booking – and their desire to find innovative partners that can help Intuit help small businesses.

We were impressed by what we saw.  You may want to check them out and judge for yourself.

We’ve observed the various ways some of our customers access the internet from their place of business and had a few ask us for advice on how best to get access at their shop. So we thought it worthwhile to summarize the primary options businesses have in accessing the internet. We included a general assessment of each option’s reliability (in terms of uptime and speed…but of course your experience may vary) and cost.

Use a trusted open wi-fi.  | Reliability:Low | Cost:Free |  Many businesses lure customers with free wi-fi nowadays, including coffee & tea shops, restaurants, and even office supply stores. There’s a good chance there’s one near your business; it’s certainly worth checking before you order something else. The downside to this approach is that the signal may not be reliable all the time. If the coffee shop fills up with many wi-fi users or if it’s a little too far away, the connection may be spotty. But it may be good enough to check your schedule for new appointments a few times a day…and it’s free!

Share with a neighbor. | Reliability:Medium | Cost:Low |  If the business next door already has internet access, it may be worth asking if you can pay a portion of their bill each month to share access. If they don’t already have a wi-fi router, you could offer to buy and help install one (just be sure to set up it up to require a password for access). One drawback to this solution is that the connection may go down when your neighbor is gone, and you’ll have no way to fix it. But it can save you and your neighbor some money.

Get a wireless card for your laptop. | Reliability:Medium | Cost:High |  All the big wireless carriers (Sprint, Verizon, AT&T, etc.) offer wireless cards for your laptop. If you haven’t seen one, it’s a small device that generally plugs into a USB port (virtually all laptops have this) that establishes an internet connection using the cellular network. With a wireless card, you could access the internet on your laptop anywhere your carrier has coverage, not just at your business. It’s pretty slick, but not cheap: most plans run about $60 per month.

Go with Clearwire.  | Reliability:High | Cost:Medium |  Another option, which has only been available for a few years now, is Clearwire (or another WIMAX provider…try Googling “wimax” for your city and see what you find). Clearwire’s coverage areas are still fairly limited, but if you happen to live in a city where it’s available, it may be a good option. At about $30 per month, it’s less expensive than a laptop wireless card and DSL/cable. With Clearwire, you receive a “wireless modem” that picks up a signal from a nearby tower (similar to cell phones). What makes this solution attractive is you can take the modem with you, so you could use the same modem at home and at work (you just need to plug it into an electric outlet), all for about $30 per month. If you’re lucky enough to live in a coverage area, I suggest checking out this option.

Fall back on DSL or Cable. | Reliability:High | Cost:High |  And finally, you can of course always go with one of the old standbys: DSL or cable. This will generally require the phone or cable company to make a visit (some time between 8:00am and Noon, right?). The reliability is generally high, but it will likely cost you around $50-$60 per month.

Creating a website for your small business should be at the top of your “to do” list – right up there with printing business cards and getting your number in the phone book. Maybe even higher, because if you want customers to find you, you’ve got to be online. Virtually everybody (82% according to one study) goes online – it’s now the #1 way that consumers search for local goods and services.

A few of the business owners we work with didn’t have websites. In fact, 38% of small businesses don’t have a website yet. And who knows how many more have one but are unhappy with it. I hear from a lot of people that they’d like to make changes to their website, but don’t know how. Often times they have to go back to the person who built it for them and pay extra.

You used to have to know HTML (a programming language) in order to make your own website, but now there’s a lot of do-it-yourself tools out there that let you build a good-looking website without any technical know-how or special software.

You start from a template (there’s hundreds to choose from) and then customize some of the design elements like the colors and fonts. You can layout the pages however you like just by dragging and dropping stuff where you want. You can upload your own logo and pictures. You can even add widgets, like a map with driving directions to your place of business or a slide show of your work. Full Slate has a widget you can copy and paste that lets clients make appointments right on your website.

The best thing about building your own website is that you can change the content whenever you want. So if you need to update your business hours or want to upload new pictures or post special offer, you can do it yourself. I’ve been playing around with these tools and can attest to how easy it is – check out this sample site.

Oh yeah, and did I mention that most of these do-it-yourself website builders are free? 🙂 Almost all of them let you build a basic website for free and only charge a small fee for advanced features, like getting your own domain name (www.this-is-the-domain-name.com) or removing a “powered by” tagline in the footer. So it’s worth checking out one of this low-cost option before spending several hundred to several thousand dollars on a professional designer.

Here’s the ones I’ve tried, plus a few others that are well reputed:

• Weebly – This is one of my favorites. It’s pretty flexible and pretty snappy (since these are web-based applications, sometimes they can be pretty slow). Plus they give you a lot of features for free. The only drawback is that they put a little tagline at the bottom of every page that says “Create a free website with Weebly,” and you have to pay to have that removed.
• Yola (used to be called Synthasite) – Comparable to Weebly. They’re templates aren’t as flexible (you can’t change some of the colors and design elements), but they have more widgets. They also try a little harder to get you to “upgrade” to paid features, but you can do a lot in the free version.
• Webs (used to be called Freewebs) – I didn’t try this one, but it’s one of the biggest out there. It looks pretty similar to the others, but I think it started out focusing on “communities” and evolved from there. They offer mailing lists and the ability to send e-newsletters, which the others don’t.
• Homestead – There’s a “lite” version that’s web-based, but you have to download and install software to be able to do stuff like upload your logo or pictures. That software doesn’t work with Mac, so I couldn’t try it. Also, even a starter website costs $4.99/mo, but you can try it free for 30 days (beware: you have to call to cancel). I mention it mainly because they’re owned by Intuit (the same company that makes QuickBooks and TurboTax), and they offer a wide-variety of services to promote and manage your business. So if you’re looking for a one-stop shop, this could be it.
• Vistaprint – Just about everybody I know gets their business cards from Vistaprint, and they have a website builder too. The starter package costs $4.99/mo, but there’s a 30 day free trial like Homestead. I took a peek with one of our customers who’s using it. Pretty rudimentary – they charge extra a for a lot of features and you can’t edit the HTML directly. You can make it match your business cards though.

Sageworks, which provides financial analysis of privately-held companies, released some encouraging data the other day. They identified 7 business categories that grew over the past 12 months, and service providers were well represented. According to Sageworks, personal care providers (hair salons, barber shops, nail salons, skin care providers, etc.) saw revenue growth of 4.5%, dentists experienced 6.9% revenue growth, and accountants grew by 10.2%. Further, a report released a few weeks ago by Sageworks showed that health practictioners such as massage therapists and chiropractors also grew by 9.3% in the past year.

Despite a recession that has been raging for a year and a half, with overall US GDP down 5-6%, we’re excited to see that many service providers are successfully fighting against the current.

Great story to share about one of our beta customers – Malinda Newstrom (http://www.malindalmp.com/).

Undaunted by the current economic environment, Malinda recently decided to start an in-your-home massage practice. Having already completed massage school, she focused on a key issue that many local service providers face: ‘how do I build a solid base of recurring clients?’

Malinda started out with a stack of flyers and some guerilla tactics. She networked, strategically placed flyers, and got a blurb in the local school newsletter. These landed her a few customers, but she needed more. When I approached her about becoming a Full Slate beta customer, she hesitated (“I’m not very technical”), but decided to give it a try. She was quickly up-and-running… and hasn’t looked back since.

Malinda recently published an inexpensive ad in a popular blog that covers her neighborhood. She offered a discount for first time customers. As a new sponsor, the blog wrote a brief post about her and included a link to book an appointment. Within the first 12 hours she had 4 newly booked appointments and a handful of inquiries. And more have come in since.

With growing awareness in her local community, Malinda is focused on delivering outstanding service to her customers and building her business through referrals and a loyal base of recurring customers – things that every local service provider should be focused on.