Sometimes a business will join Facebook with visions of instant success and many followers. Forbes offers a few reasons why your business may be failing on Facebook.
You’re trying too hard.
Spamming your followers with non-stop brand-related chatter will make you lose followers, not gain fans. Social media works best when it involves an element of play. Develop a compelling voice. Be entertaining. Use humor. This the internet, not a board meeting.
You don’t get it.
Here’s the thing: You don’t have to understand social media. In fact, those who refer to themselves as “social media rock stars” really don’t get it. The truth is: Nobody gets it, not really, not yet. It’s evolving. Today’s expert is tomorrow’s idiot.
You don’t own it.
You hired a company to do your social media for you. Since you became thei
A couple months ago, American Express OPEN commissioned me to write my startup story, How I Accidentally Became a Professional Blogger in 2001. They did this to promote a contest that theyre running called Big Break for Small Business.
As part of the competition, theyre going to give five small businesses $20,000 to help grow, and there are only 6 more days left to vote on the 11 finalists.
The European Banking Authority (EBA) will reveal the results of stress tests of 90 banks across Europe later today.
The latest round of tests arose after last year’s failed to reveal the weakness among banks in Ireland and have been conducted to ensure banks have enough capital to cope with difficult economic situations, such as recession.
However, according to a recent report by Reuters, more than a dozen banks in Spain, Greece, Germany and Portugal are expected to fail.
The euro zone debt crisis has resulted in a surge in borrowing costs in countries such as Spain and Italy and this has raised concern that banks are not able to withstand potential losses if the crisis worsens.
The latest series of tests are regarded as the strictest since the global financial crisis, which commenced almost four years ago.
Ezra Klein explains thirty years of the debt ceiling in one graph (note the Congressional control appears to be backwards):
The US banking reporting season has got off to a good start today after JP Morgan reported a 13% increase in profits to $5.4 billion (£3.3 billion) – exceeding analysts’ expectations.
Furthermore, revenues were 7% higher in the three months to the end of June at $27.4 billion.
The good performance comes despite losses from bad mortgage debt.
Meanwhile, net profits at its investment bank came in at $2 billion, while those at its commercial arm totalled $607 million.
The bank, which is the second largest in the US by assets, saw its shares advance 3% after the announcement.
Other US banking giants will report their results in the next few days.
An Australian man caused quite a stir in Bathurst, New South Wales last week while testing the equipment for his new aerial photography business. The locals thought it might have been a UFO, but it was really just a microdrone helicopter.
Microdrones are unmanned arial vehicles (basically remote controlled airplanes and helicopters) similar to what the military uses to find terrorists in the desert, but much less sophisticated and cheaper.
Kendall Plummer’s new microdrone is small, white, carries various cameras, and has been flying around the Bathurst region for the past four months.
Mr Plummer has been testing his microdrone in preparation for launching his new business, Aerial Exposure.
“The microdrone is for low-level aerial photography,” he said.
Kendall plans to use his microdrone for real estate and wedding photography. He cu
As Matt has discussed before he used to be a borrower on Lending Club but is now an investor with a growing portfolio. Peer to peer lending provides an excellent opportunity for investors to start out small and slowly grow their investment. There are two main players in peer to peer lending: the aforementioned Lending Club as well as Prosper. The principles discussed in this article will apply to both companies.
The average return for investors in Lending Club and Prosper is around 10%. So even if you earn the average return you are doing better than almost any other fixed income investment. The big question is, as an investor how do you ensure that you earn at least the average return? The key is diversification. You need to spread your risk among many loans.
Here is an example to illustrate how important diversification is for your return. Let‚