Millennials Driving SmartPhone Usage
I WAS TALKING to a tradesperson in his mid twenties and how he wants to start his own business.
The more we spoke, the more I realised that this bloke runs his life almost entirely from his mobile phone — and doesn’t have a computer or laptop!
After having spoken to a few tradies in the last 6 months, I realise that this is the case for many of them. In large part, it’s because the nature of their work is outdoors and requires them to focus on what they’re doing there and then on a work site.
What this guy is very good at doing is replying to SMS text messages and using Facebook Messenger. This made me think about how much of your business you can actually do with a smart phone and via text messaging.
(It also made me think about how much business we might all be doing via Facebook whether we like it or not, but that is a topic for another blog post!)
How do you use your SmartPhone?
I am an Android / Google person through and through because I like their open source model and low priced (OK, cheap) solutions. Way back in 2012 I wrote about how the smartphone could replace your computer.
What I didn’t realise at the time is that most people want to run their business while they are doing it — ON THE GO — rather than have to plug it into a big screen and keyboard when they got home or to the office.
If you are interested in ways of using your SmartPhone as your office computer check out these sites!
- https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andromium/the-superbook-turn-your-smartphone-into-a-laptop-f
- https://getsuperbook.com/
- http://au.slimportconnect.com/
- http://nexdock.com/
I use my smartphone for:
- emails
- texting
- calendar scheduling
- checking online support and chat activity
- reading the news
- checking website analytics
- taking photographs
- internet banking (using CBA Netbank)
- a street directory
- real estate property searches
- research on any of the projects I’m working on
- making and receiving phone calls.
The things I don’t do on my phone are:
- writing and publishing blog posts
- transferring funds using NAB (because their Internet banking is sad)
- accounts and bookkeeping (interesting, huh?)
Thoughts of what we do with our smartphones made me explore a little deeper into something very simple that I think most tradies would like to do — “Send invoices by SMS”
This is what I found out:
Quickbooks Online seem to make it possible in an integration with iCheckGateway (no pricing on website)- FreshBooks enable it as an integration with Zapier
- Xero and MYOB both have integrations with Servicem8 which seems to provide many SMS templates
- Xero has an integration with SMS My Debtors (their video is hosted on Wistia! – Great video hosting that we teach in our Social Media Marketing Course)
- MYOB and Xero have an integration with EzyCollect
- DirectSMS have an integration with an integration!! They integrate with Zapier that integrates with Xero
It seems like much of the functionality that people are starting to want is available as a paid extra. However, what doesn’t make sense is the fact that I can send an unlimited number of text messages as part of my mobile plan.
Can’t these modern accounting programs just take advantage of that feature?
***
I’m very interested in hearing back if you have a real world experience where you’re using a smart phone to do something you would normally do from a desktop or laptop computer. Drop me a line at sales@ezylearn.com.au! I’d love to talk about you and your business in the blog.
No matter who you are or what you do you will need content and you will use that content to promote you and the services you provide. I have been using all of these tools to help convert EzyLearn into an “online only” training company in 2006 but I was able to explore how to provide these services to real estate agents when I managed the social media strategy for Derek Farmer, a real estate agent in Cammeray at the time. Here are the content options we had to play with:
EzyLearn has several hundred videos as part of our online training courses and sometimes we use them to give prospective students 
This is the one that EVERYONE is interested in and for good reason; the demographic targeting is fantastic. Facebook is becoming increasingly important for real estate agents to promote themselves — indeed, Social Estate and BuddyBid are just two companies getting in early to earn a couple of hundred dollars a month for each real estate agent they take on board.
Most people think it’s important to create a Facebook post every day but that’s hard to do if you need to generate original content. Instead most people re-post other content that is relevant to the audience — this is often referred to as curated content (for instance, where you make a comment or affirm your belief in an article).
Facebook ads are relatively simple to create so there is NO reason to get someone else to do them (particularly if they’re going to charge you the equivalent of 4 hours’ labour!). The key elements of a Facebook Ad are their structure: Campaigns, Adsets, then individual ads and once you get that right and understand how it works, creating a Facebook Ad can be done by someone in your office or who you trust (again, a work at home mum).
In our Social Media Marketing Course we include every aspect of how to manage your own website using the very popular WordPress Content Management System. This includes having multiple users be able to publish content. We also teach you how to optimise your blogs and pages for important keywords using tags and categories, how to use meta tags on your pages and even on images so everything gets indexed by Google and how to make your website look fantastic with professional themes (templates).
Google Analytics is the most popular website traffic analysing system and you can use it to measure the effectiveness of your website day-by-day, week-by-week and for specific date ranges.
With the New Year coming fast we find most of our students are looking to change careers and/or up-skill so as to feel confident with their computer skills in job interviews and the like, so our current special offers will train you up to be your best, cheaply. Here’s all you need to do:
One of the most powerful internet based applications that we use everyday is Dropbox. It’s powerful because it enables you to automatically backup any files you save into your Dropbox folder AND it enables you to access your files from any computer. When you delve deeper into Dropbox and start using it on your Smartphone you’ll also discover that every photo you take on your phone (and screen shot) can be automatically saved into your “Camera Uploads” folder within Dropbox so no matter how much phone storage space you have you’ll always have a copy of images in Dropbox.
Although I’ve had some exposure to Salesforce when I originally spoke to that company (many years ago and much has probably changed) they only offered yearly plans (but showed them as a low monthly fee) and the upfront cost was too high so I didn’t go down that path.
I had the pleasure of meeting Reece, the managing director of CreataCRM, at Cebit 2016 and was amazed I’d never heard of this company before.
