If you’re an Internet based business such as our web based accounting, then you might already be leveraging your social media networks.

There are plenty out there from Twitter to Facebook, and all of them have different types of scenarios that you should be paying attention to since the audiences are actually somewhat different. For example, if you are leveraging Facebook, there’s a good chance that you’re trying to sell a product or service to friends and acquaintances that you’ve met along the ways. However, microblogging sites such as Twitter provide a different type of scenario where the audience is not only the people that are looking to follow you, but also the real-time stream of information going across like a river. If it passes at just the right time, when someone is looking, you’ll have gained more eyes on your marketing.

Now, there’s multiple reasons to do social media networks, and it truly depends on whether or not your segmented market audience happens to use these services. For us, many of our clients happen to be freelancers of all types and are very in-tune with social networks in general which makes it a great area to not only market to those individuals, but communicate and provide customer relations through those channels. I do not believe that all small businesses should use this as a shotgun blast type marketing since it’s way too broad and is very much dependent to whom you are catering. But if you do provide products and services to an Internet market? Leverage your social networks like there’s no tomorrow.

One of the things that I notice while working with clients over mediums such as Twitter is that there are a lot of small businesses that outsource their administrative work to virtual assistants (VAs). Most of these VAs tout their ability to use many types of mainstream accounting products but what I never did understand was why there was such a small push for cloud based products.

Web based accounting actually performs their duties at a low-cost and provides an easier way of managing bookkeeping. There are accounting solutions out there that allow multiple company support and ways to keep all of the bookkeeping in order when it comes to tracking multiple businesses. It also makes it a lot easier to accomodate the VAs since much of their data is virtual. But in the end, here’s the key point on why your VA should be using a cloud format for your accounting needs instead of an offline one:

Do you trust your VA enough to secure your business’ financial data?

A VA that uses offline accounting products does not necessarily understand how to secure and protect your financial data. Do they backup your books? Is it stored on the same drive or a separate drive. How often is this process done? Is it encrypted or out in the open? A cloud based service however, needs to take security into account and provide your business with as much redundancy as possible. Most services not only transfer your data via SSL, but also provide redundancy on the backend. Your data should be on hot-swap RAIDs and probably also have a cold backup solution.

Don’t get me wrong. Nothing wrong with VAs, nor if they use offline products. But the real question as a business owner is if you want them to work on your data without some guarantees of backing up your financials. And a web based accounting can provide all of that for you, and your VA without fail.