Central Perk

joi, 31 iulie 2014

LinkedIn: How to spark more engagement with your followers

Posted: 29 Jul 2014 01:14 AM PDT

Do you want to create more engagement with your LinkedIn followers?

As we found out in April of this year, LinkedIn company pages underwent a major change. The products and services section was removed, much to people's disappointment as this was a logical place for companies to showcase their products and services. But don't let the fact they’ve disappeared throw you into disarray, LinkedIn still offers plenty of benefits for your company.

Why use a LinkedIn Company page?

LinkedIn is now responsible for a whopping 64% of all visits from social media channels to corporate websites. In contrast, Facebook accounts for around 17% of such visits, while Twitter is a mere 14%.
There are 148 million different industries represented on company pages
There are now over 3 million LinkedIn company pages

So how can we use LinkedIn to engage with our followers?

#1 – Post More

Ever wondered why no one likes or comments on your company updates? A lot of us are guilty of posting LinkedIn updates only once or twice a week, but that is probably why we often see little to no engagement.

LinkedIn has found that 20 posts per month can help you reach 60% of your unique audience. In contrast, when you only post occasionally, your single post only reaches 20% of your audience. Why only 20%? The less frequent you post, the less you’ll show up on your audiences home feed. The more you post, the more chance your updates have of being seen. Don’t post too frequently though as this can be annoying!

If you’re not sure on what to post, I found this infographic that can help you understand the elements of a LinkedIn update.

Key takeaway - A frequent posting schedule will help you reach more people, more often.

#2 – Be More Visual

"A picture is worth a thousand words". It might be a major cliché but this holds truth on LinkedIn. Images make your company page much more attractive to your current and potential followers and as a result, they are more likely to engage with your content.

Don’t forget to use a relevant and compelling image in your banner as well as your updates to boost your visibility to your audience.

Key takeaway: Use a compelling image in your LinkedIn company page banner as well as in your updates.

#3 – Show & Tell

toms video

Online video is growing at a significant rate. Gone are the days when companies could use chunks of text. Users want more creative ways to engage!

1. In 2013, over 52 billion videos were viewed online
2. 52% of customers say that watching videos of products makes them more confident in online purchasing decisions.

There are a variety of ways to take your LinkedIn videos to the next level.

Short Videos

Typically less than 15 seconds, these can be used to focus your message. You can use them to showcase a book, demonstrate how a product works. Vine and Instagram videos work well to create these videos.

Event videos

Think of these as testimonials as opposed to ads. These contain the best parts of your company, your products and your customers. They aren't an outright advertisement.

Interview videos

Q&A videos let you highlight your relationship with industry experts whether you are interviewing a person outside of your company or an employee.

Key takeaway: your followers are looking for something more creative than just paragraphs of text. Mix your page up with videos!

#4 – Showcase Pages

Showcase pages are relatively new and are definitely an exciting addition to this social platform. These pages let you customise your messages and engage different audience segments based on their product interest. For example, Hp have a range of products and they use showcase pages to target their different segments of audience.

Key takeaway: Create showcases to make sure your customers can easily learn about the product or services that interests them the most.

#5 – Engagement

Many of your followers have followed you as a way to interact with you. Ask people questions and reply to their answers. It's a good way to test how people perceive your products or services and can give you inspiration for new products.

Hootsuite posted an update that asked its followers to share the social media story that was most memorable to them in 2013. This is a great way to spark conversations between you as industry experts and your audience.

Key takeaway – LinkedIn may be a professional networking space, but don't forget that it is also a social network. Make that effort to communicate with your followers through updates and responses.

#6 – Add the follow button

LinkedIn's developers page makes it easy to create and add a 'follow us' button to your company website. You simply type your name in the appropriate field, choose your button style and copy the code to your website.

Key takeaway - Take advantage of this resource and let your audience know where they can find and engage with you!

Do you have any tips to add? Have you used any of these tactics on your company page? Let me know in the comments or by tweeting me @KLBennett_

Image Credit

The post LinkedIn: How to spark more engagement with your followers appeared first on White.net.

Seth's Blog : Trading favors

Trading favors

Those people who owe you—because you mowed their lawn, drove carpool, promoted their site, gave them advice, listened to you in the middle of the night—they will probably let you down.

Favors aren't for trading, they wear out, they fade away, they are valued differently by the giver and the receiver.

No, the best favors are worth doing for the doing, not because we'll ever get paid back appropriately.

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miercuri, 30 iulie 2014

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

When All Else Fails Blame "Free Markets"
Political Greenwashing: US Exports Coal Pollution to Europe; What About China?
M.A.D. Sanctions; Two Games at Once

When All Else Fails Blame "Free Markets"

Posted: 30 Jul 2014 07:55 PM PDT

It's rather amazing how people blame "free markets" for things that are 180 degrees removed from "free markets".

For example, and in response to Political Greenwashing: US Exports Coal Pollution to Europe; What About China? reader Over Exposed writes "Excellent example of a complete and utter failure of the free market to deal with pollution".

I see and hear this every day. I would have hoped that people would have learned by now what a "free market" is and isn't.

Chinese State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) are not "free markets"
Chinese growth targets at any cost are not "free markets"
Interest rate manipulation in the US have nothing to do with "free markets"
Chinese and Swiss National Bank currency manipulations have nothing to do with "free markets"
Ben Bernanke's and Janet Yellen's 2% inflation target - horrendously applied - and ignoring asset bubbles are as far removed from "free markets" as you can get.

Complete fools blame the "free market" for problems 100% caused precisely because we do not have "free markets".

Popular Myths

Contrary to popular myth, free market libertarians do not support slavery, anarchy, or pollution. Rather, we strongly believe in property rights and human rights. No one can own anyone else.

No one can kill you, steal your goods, or damage your property. Laws and regulations that protect property rights and prevent fraud are welcome.

It is amazing how people clamor for more regulation to cure problems caused by regulation and excessive interference in free markets.

Can We Please Try "Free Markets"?

We've tried everything else, and it did not work. Can we please try "free markets" with the minimum number of regulations and laws needed to preserve property rights, preserved human rights, and prevent fraud?

Sadly, I suspect the answer is no. Neither vested interests nor jackasses who have no idea what is really going on, want "free markets".

It's a powerful combination, and we all lose because of it.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Political Greenwashing: US Exports Coal Pollution to Europe; What About China?

Posted: 30 Jul 2014 11:58 AM PDT

While president Obama brags about clean energy advances in the US (mostly hot air and subsidies to uneconomic businesses), the US quietly exports pollution to Europe. Coal is a particular good example.

Please consider US Exports Help Germany Increase Coal, Pollution

LUENEN, Germany - One of Germany's newest coal-fired power plants rises here from the banks of a 100-year-old canal that once shipped coal mined from the Ruhr Valley to the world. Now the coal comes the other way.

The 750-megawatt Trianel Kohlekraftwerk Luenen GmbH & Co. power plant relies completely on coal imports, about half from the U.S. Soon, all of Germany's coal-fired power plants will be dependent on imports, with the country expected to halt coal mining in 2018 when government subsidies end.

Coal mining's demise in Germany comes as the country is experiencing a resurgence in coal-fired power, one which the U.S. increasingly has helped supply. U.S. exports of power plant-grade coal to Germany have more than doubled since 2008. In 2013, Germany ranked fifth, behind the United Kingdom, Netherlands, South Korea and Italy in imports of U.S. steam coal, the type burned in power plants.

On the American side of the pollution ledger, this fossil fuel trade helps the United States look as if it is making more progress on global warming than it actually is. That's because it shifts some pollution — and the burden for cleaning it — onto another other country's balance sheet.

"This is a classic case of political greenwashing," said Dirk Jansen, a spokesman for BUND, a German environmental group. "Obama pretties up his own climate balance, but it doesn't help the global climate at all if Obama's carbon dioxide is coming out of chimneys in Germany."

It's a global shell game that threatens to undermine Obama's strategy of reducing the gases blamed for global warming and reveals a little-discussed side effect of countries acting alone on a global problem.

The explanation for Germany's increase is simple: Coal is cheaper than alternatives, particularly natural gas. So, too, are the prices on the carbon market in Europe. Companies can afford to buy the right to release more pollution.

In the U.S., the opposite is happening. Any new coal-fired power plants will have to capture carbon dioxide and bury it underground if the Obama administration gets its way. Few if any new coal plants are expected to be built.

But the U.S. and other countries have no problem supplying Germany and the world with coal.

Global Warming Slant

The article's "global warming" slant is of course ridiculous. Yet, the article does expose the hypocrisy of the Obama administration on that subject.

I am in favor of reducing pollution, for current health reasons, not absurd global warming claims.

Pollution in China

Check out Images of Chinese Pollution.
Here's a small sampling taken from dozens of images.

Chinese Deaths Due to Pollution

In 2010, over 1.2 million Chinese deaths were attributed to pollution.

China.Org has the report.

Chinese GDP Massively Overstated

The world is in awe of Chinese growth. But that "growth" comes at huge expense. There is a massive cleanup cost associated with this rampant pollution, and Chinese growth is overstated by the future cost of cleanup.

Chinese growth is also overstated by malinvestment - vacant cities, vacant malls, unused infrastructure, and totally unproductive State Owned Enterprise (SOE) debt Ponzi schemes.

Subtract malinvestments and pollution, and China is barely growing, if growing at all.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

M.A.D. Sanctions; Two Games at Once

Posted: 30 Jul 2014 01:30 AM PDT

M.A.D. Sanctions

Sanctions are a lose-lose-lose game. Consumers lose, businesses lose, countries lose. And the hypocrisy alone is appalling.

The EU wants sanctions to hurt Russia "more" than the EU. Thus the EU let a French military sale to Russia go through, while blocking transactions and travel of Russians who had virtually nothing to do with this mess.

Knockout Blow?

For all their efforts will the US or EU accomplish anything with the sanctions on Russia?

Financial Times writer Christopher Granville has the answer in his take EU's Sanctions on Russia Will Fail to be a Knockout Blow.

The main burden of the EU sanctions mooted by the commission would appear to fall on the UK. The core measure targets debt and equity capital raising by the Russian state banks and bans European intermediaries from offering associated underwriting and advisory services, and the bulk of such business is done in the City of London. Capital market funding is also a small portion of overall foreign funding of Russian banks (about 3.5 per cent as of March 2014), so an important detail about the EU sanctions package as regards both overall impact and burden sharing between the member states will be whether the prohibition on financing Russian banks will extend to ordinary lending. The international syndicated loan market for Russian borrowers is dominated by continental European banks. French banks have the largest exposure of $52.5bn.

This analysis presupposes that the EU will never go for the "nuclear" sanctions option of banning gas imports from Russia, and that the EU and US together will not try to replicate against Russia the ban on oil exports imposed on Iran. The EU cannot for now substitute its present annual gas import volumes of 150bn cubic metres from Russia, and the loss of Russia's present level of crude oil exports – 7m barrels a day, compared to Iran's 2.5m b/d – would trigger a sharp rise in the oil price and a global economic slump. This would be the economic equivalent of the Cold War-era concept of nuclear deterrence based on mutually assured destruction.

Short of the "MAD" options, the Russian economy will decline and Europe will suffer, but there will be no knockout blow and, as so often in Russia's history, the Russian nation may be expected to rally around in the face of hardship caused by foreign foes.

Loser Analysis

According to Granville, Europe and Russia will both suffer. On that, I agree.

Granville thinks the UK will suffer most.

From a financing standpoint, I suspect Granville is correct. But from a manufacturing and trade standpoint, I believe Germany will be the big loser.

Two Games at Once

MAD is really a game of chicken.

Granville misses the mark in one respect: The choice to go "nuclear" is not only in the hands of the EU.

Yes, the EU could ban all imports. But they won't.

Here's the MAD game at hand: The US and EU want to apply pressure on Russia but not so much pressure that Russia cuts off natural gas supplies to the rest of Europe.

Europe needs the gas, and Russia needs the hard currency. It's mutual destruction if gas is shutoff.

Fool's Mission

If things do get MAD, there will be a knockout blow to global trade, not just to Russia. Yet, if the US and EU pressure Russia too much, then Russia may feel like it has nothing to lose. Why not go down fighting?

The US/EU game of chicken all starts with the notion that Putin will react as expected and eventually blink first.

I wonder how long the expected lasts. I suggest not as long as the bureaucrats think. Regardless, the exercise is a fool's mission from the start given that everyone loses from sanctions.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com